The Role of Context

Context plays a major role in the communication process. It contributes both to what is communicated directly and to what is communicated indirectly.

Their roles, the amount of power differential between them, the degree of distance-closeness between them, the number of people present.

The participants

How costly or beneficial the message is to hearer or speaker, how face-threatening it is. Whether it exceeds or stays within the rights and obligations of the relationship.

The message context

How the norms of the activity influence language behavior such as right to talk or ask questions, discourse structure and level of formality.

The communicative activity(such as a job interview or a lecture)

There are two broad approaches to pragmatics:

1) Cognitive-psychological approach

2) Social-psychological approach

Pragmatic research: paradigms and methods

Cognitive pragmaticists are concerned with fundamental questions such as: What is communication? And how is communication possible? They are interested in exploring the relation between the decontextualized, linguistic meaning of utterances. What speakers mean by their utterances and how listeners interpret them.

Cognitive pragmatics

Social pragmaticists tend to focus on the ways in which particular communicative exchanges between individuals are embedded in and constrained by social, cultural and other contextual factors. Social pragmatics usually takes an empirical approach and emphasizes the collection of pragmatic data for descriptive purposes.

Social pragmatics

Social pragmatics usually takes an empirical approach and emphasizes the collection of pragmatic data for descriptive purposes and testing or modifying the existing theories. Cognitive-psychological tradition is less concerned with large-scale data collection, and tends to theorize from specific examples of communicative utterances.

Differences between social-psychological and cognitive-

psychological pragmatics

On-line: authentic conversations, elicited conversations, and role-played interactions

Off-line: questionnaires, diaries and interviews

Data Collection:

The collection of on-line data brings into focus the problem of the "observer's paradox": the concern that the interactants' awareness of being observed and recorded for research purposes may affect their communicative behavior.

On-line data collection disadvantage:

the use of two or more different methods so that the same results can be obtained.

Triangulation :

Pragmatics is a discipline which investigates the different aspects of the complex relation between the linguistic meaning and contextual interpretation, so it plays a major role in learning and teaching a new language.

Pragmatics and Language Learning and Teaching

It is important for teachers to consider the possibility of pragmatic transfer occurring. There are pragmatic differences, as there are phonological or syntactic differences. For example, in the phrase “in the light of this”, a singular deictic(this/that) is used in Eng whereas a plural is used in Greek.

The possibility of pragmatic transfer

Cross-cultural pragmatics is the study of linguistic action carried out by language users from different ethnolinguistic backgrounds.

Cross-cultural Pragmatics:

It explores how foreign language learner's performance is compared with that of native speakers.

Interlanguage Pragmatics:

Differences in the linguistic strategies used to convey a given illocutionary force.

Sociopragmatic differences:Differences in the social assessments, beliefs and principles that underlie language use.

Pragmalinguistic differences:

Teachers need to consider the extent to which language instruction can improve students' pragmatic proficiency. Investigation shows that learners receiving instruction in pragmatics outperformed those who did not, and that “ without instruction in pragmatics, learners do not achieve sufficient ability in pragmatic areas.

Pragmatic proficiency and the value of language instruction

There are two main areas where teachers can help students improve their pragmatic proficiency:•Expose learners to pragmatically authentic input material•Assist learners with pragmatic comprehension

Materials and methods for developing pragmatic proficiency

Textbooks: A pragmatically friendly textbook might involve pragmatic awareness raising activities, but in general, textbooks can't be counted on as a reliable source of pragmatic input for classroom language learners.

Research: It is vital that teaching materials on L2pragmatics are research-based.

Dictionaries: Kawamura argues that pragmatic information in both monolingual and bilingual dictionaries needs to be significantly improved.

Authentic pragmatic inputs:

People's use of language is closely interconnected with their senses of identity and people need to be able to present themselves in ways that they feel comfortable with. Learners need to be able to make that choice for themselves, to have a range of strategies at their disposal and to select among them to present themselves as they personally wish.

Pragmatic performance and learner identity

The End