Date: Sunday, January 21, 1:30 — 4:00 p.m.
Place: Hokkai Gakuen University, 3rd floor of Building 6
Cost: Free for JALT members; Y500 for 1-day guests

Teaching Speech Acts Can Enrich Our Students' Learning

Presenter: Jeremie Bouchard, Sapporo Sacred Heart School

Abstract: The presentation will discuss a pedagogical initiative involving a textbook designed around the teaching of speech acts, which was introduced at Sapporo Sacred Heart School (S.S.H.S.), a Catholic school for girls. Hopefully, discussing this initiative will lead to a more general exchange on both the teaching of speech acts as a means of enriching our students’ performance in the target language, and on material design. Speech acts are understood as attempts by language users to perform specific actions, in particular interpersonal functions such as compliments, apologies, requests or complaints.

The main inspiration for this initiative came from an article written in The Language Teacher of May 2004 by John Fujimori and Noel Houck titled "Practical criteria for teaching speech acts," in which the authors argued for explicit teaching of speech acts, and provided techniques and activities to teach advice-giving, a speech act which they perceived as especially relevant to the Japanese EFL context. The initiative is therefore meant as a practical extension of Fujimori and Houck's original idea. It came out of a needs analysis stemming from a concern over S.S.H.S. students' relative difficulties in using the target language to achieve specific language tasks, despite the existence of sufficient grammar competence. It was found that S.S.H.S. EFL teaching practices failed to include the teaching of pragmatic competence and grammar in discourse, and persistently limited itself to sentence-based grammar teaching. Moreover, the presentation will discuss the possibility of raising students’ motivation to learn English through the introduction of both a new pedagogical approach based on the teaching of speech acts and by the design of course materials specifically tailored to meet the students' perceived learning needs.

Report: Bouchard started the presentation with a set of questions that probed the audience's knowledge of pragmatics and to foster conversation about how we see its usefulness in the classroom. He then moved on to explain the concept of "speech acts" and the course he has designed that is based on developing understanding of them in the EFL classroom. Speech acts are understood as attempts by language users to perform specific actions, in particular interpersonal functions such as compliments, apologies, requests or complaints. We discussed activities that might be used to exercise the different speech acts that he introduced. He made an interesting point by citing the book, The Virtues Project, by Linda Kavelin Popov, which provides a set of speech acts that students would benefit in learning. Overall the presentation was full of good information and provided lots of "food for thought" about what is important to teach in the EFL classroom and what might help motivate students to study.

--Reported by Bricklin Zeff

Bio: Jeremie Bouchard is in his fifth year working at Sapporo Sacred Heart School, a Catholic school for girls. He is particularly interested in material design and teaching speech acts. In his classes, he tries to balance oral and written production. E-mail: jeremiebouchard8@yahoo.com