Enhancing awareness of pragmatic behavior

Ashurali Mirzayev Language and Culture

In the paragraphs below the activity named “Enhancing awareness of pragmatic behavior” will be evaluated in terms of its efficiency and constructiveness.

First, a brief overview is provided to make a big picture of the activity. This activity aims to enable EFL and ESL instructors to enhance their students’ awareness of how to use the knowledge of pragmatics efficiently. It is done by organizing a role play activity concerns how an employer and his employee are communicating in their speech community. And this is observed and analyzed another student based on his/her knowledges of pragmatics.

It should be admitted that this activity can meet majority of the demands of appropriateness for most foreign classrooms regarding their culture and level of proficiency. For example, as Cohen (2014) represented “It is also our view that only teacher readers themselves can decide how the information provided in this book would actually be used in their respective classrooms in their own institutional contexts” (p. 22). In the activity there is a gap in the instructions of evaluating students’ performance, in other words there isn’t any assigned instructions. This case is due to the fact that every nation and culture has its own context and distinguishing rituals which constitutes the norms of pragmatics which works only in that speech community. As an example, take the following question “Why haven’t you gotten married yet?”. While in some cultures like Uzbek it is considered to be very direct and unacceptable, in another language community, it may be perfectly acceptable to ask this question (Cohen, 2014, p. 5). So the observer can evaluate the performance coming from the norms of the target speech community.

In the meantime, in the objectives part of the article two main aims are mentioned which claim the participants of the activity will be able to master, firstly, what constitutes appropriate pragmatic behavior, according to the contextual factors such as status, level of acquaintance, and the stakes in the situation and, secondly, identify the level of formality, directness, and politeness of a scripted complaint interaction and to identify that your own behavior might shift in an apology situation with a working associate (Cohen, 2014, p. 17). However, the doers of the activity can probably have some difficulty in implementing the objectives as there are some factors to consider below. For example, in the objectives it is stated that the students will be aware about appropriate pragmatic behavior according to the level of formality, status and stakes. However, as the students may probably aware of only their native culture and pragmatic norms, regarding this, I suggest to add one additional instruction which refers to order students to learn about different cultures’ pragmatic norms. As a result one performance can be observed and analyzed based on knowledge of many different speech communities at the same time. As Cohen (2014) stated “they need to know what it is (subject-matter knowledge). This would include knowing that pragmatic norms vary depending on, for example, the regional, generational, gender and ethnic backgrounds of the speakers”. For this reason it is recommendable that firstly, the students who are responsible for observing and commenting the performance should be well-informed about the target speech community in order to make a constructive feedback.

Another weak point of the activity can be about lack of authenticity. Of course it is not only this activity or another, it may be considered the issue of every classroom activity and assessment, because of the fact that these kind of techniques can refer to some snapshots of the actual performance of learners. When it comes specifically to the activity, it may also have some sort of leakage of reliability as Cohen (2014) mentioned “under the mistaken impression that these norms represent the actual speech patterns of the community” (p. 38). However, it is suggested to have more cases in the same context to get more reliable responses from the learners.