Chapter I. Pragmatic aspects of english teaching and learning

Situational Context
Hymes (2014), drawing on Malinowski and Firth, and expanding Jakobson’s notion of context, devised his own set of factors to describe the situational context of the speech event. He lists these under the acronym SPEAKING.
Setting - the place is of certain importance – we tend to change our language in accordance with the setting of our conversation. Does the conversation take place in a café, in the street, in a railway station, in the director’s office, on a conference? Learners need to be familiar with the place so that they can adjust their language accordingly.
Participants carry various roles during their conversation. In various situations, participants are given roles, for example, a parent, a teacher, a classmate, a patient, a shop assistant, a client, a business partner. A child cannot be talked to in the same manner as an adult. This is a well-known fact and the awareness of necessity to alter our language depending on the people we are talking to has to be considered in the classroom environment too. We tend to be more polite when talking to a person we do not know well, a person more senior in age or someone who is of a higher status. English has no special pronouns through which we show politeness and familiarity like some languages, for instance Czech ty/Vy. Familiarity is expressed in other ways, for example we tend to omit polite addresses in front of people’s surnames such as Ms, Mrs, Mr, professor, doctor etc. We can use first names or even nicknames instead.
Ends - the purpose of a conversation is also significant. Students have to be familiar with the aim of a conversation they are going to perform as a role-play or simulation. They need to know why they are having a conversation and what the outcome is supposed to be: an arrangement to meet, to make a bargain in a shop, to give an honest opinion to a friend, to ask someone a favour, etc.
Act sequences - certain types of talk require certain linguistic forms. They are culture specific. Each culture has its adjacency pairs typical for certain speech events. One-way meanings are communicated and interpreted through the use of adjacency pairs. They can be classified as utterances produced successively by two speakers in such a way that the second utterance is identified as closely related to the first one. These utterances are related, not any second pair can follow any first pair part, but only an appropriate one, a greeting is followed by another greeting, an apology by an acknowledge, a congratulation by a thanks, and the like. McCarthy (1991:120) argues that the function of the initial part of an adjacency pair is determined by the context which it is uttered in. Thus, a single word Thanks can be an expression of appreciation, surprise, reproach, relief, etc. depending maybe on the intonation.
This is closely related to what Hymes calls the key – the tone, manner or spirit of the act, which can be serious or ironic. For example, the word Hello can be said in many various ways according to the situation.