Teachers' perceptions of the value and their practices in teaching pragmatics including the use of authentic texts

Date
2009
Authors
Denny, H
Basturkmen, H
Supervisor
Item type
Conference Contribution
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
AUT University
Abstract

Research shows that even learners with advanced levels of grammatical competence may still experience pragmatic difficulties (Bardovi-Harlig & Dornyei, 1998) and that some form of explicit instruction is helpful for acquisition (Kasper & Roever, 2004). The investigation was conducted in a tertiary level educational setting in Auckland. Data for the study were drawn from questionnaires and interviews with teachers from a range of academic, vocational and community focused English language programs. In this paper, we provide a summary of the objectives and design of the study and we focus on findings related to three key issues: areas in which pragmatics-focused materials are seen as lacking; barriers to teachers’ use of authentic texts in teaching pragmatics and the methods and activities teachers use in teaching pragmatics, including a range of methods and activities that are well known and some that are less well known. This research has been funded by AKO Aotearoa and it is the preliminary stage of a broader scale action research project in which teachers working as research participants develop and evaluate their own pragmatics-focused materials based on authentic listening texts.

Description
Keywords
Source
Participation and Acquisition: Exploring these metaphors in Applied Linguistics, Auckland, New Zealand, 2009-12-02 - 2009-12-04
DOI
Rights statement
NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in (see Citation). The original publication is available at (see Publisher's Version)