Teaching Pragmatics

Teaching Pragmatics explores the teaching of pragmatics through lessons and activities created by teachers of English as a second and foreign language. This book is written for teachers by teachers. Our teacher-contributors teach in seven different countries and are both native-speakers and nonnative speakers of English. Activities reflect ESL and EFL classroom settings. The chapters included here allow teachers to see how other teachers approach the teaching of pragmatics and to appreciate the diversity and creativity of their endeavors. Taken together, the activities constitute a spectrum of possibilities for teaching pragmatics. Each submission provides novel insight into the ESL/EFL classroom and demonstrates that there is no single approach to the teaching of pragmatics. The variety of approaches means that pragmatics can be integrated easily into any classroom, whether traditional or communicative.
What is pragmatics?
The study of pragmatics explores the ability of language users to match utterances with contexts in which they are appropriate; in Stalnaker 's words, pragmatics is "the study of linguistic acts and the contexts in which they are performed" (1972, p. 383). The teaching of pragmatics aims to facilitate the learners ' ability to find socially appropriate language for the situations they encounter. Within second language studies and teaching, pragmatics encompasses speech acts, conversational structure, conversational implicature, conversational management, discourse organization, and sociolinguistic aspects of language use, such as choice of address forms. These areas of language and language use have not traditionally been addressed in language teaching curricula, leading one of our students to ask if we could teach him "the secret rules of English." Pragmatic rules for language use are often subconscious, and even native speakers are often unaware of pragmatic rules until they are broken (and feelings are hurt, offense is taken, or things

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