Date: Sunday, July 15, 1:30 — 4:00 p.m.
Place: Hokkai Gakuen University (6th Floor International Conference Room in Library Building)
Cost: Guests Y500, JALT members free

Learning Pragmatics in Foreign Language Classrooms
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Presenter: Gabriele Kasper, University of Hawai'i at Manoa

Report: The challenge for foreign language teachers as explained by Dr. Kasper is “How can L2 pragmatic development be supported through L2 teaching?” Pragmatic competence includes both interactional (speaking) and textual (reading and writing) competence as well as hybrid forms such as computer-mediated communication. In the foreign language context students cannot easily practice outside of the classroom what they’ve learned in class. Although Dr. Kasper qualified the following, saying that only 12 studies were analyzed, preliminary research seems to show that explicitly teaching pragmatics is more effective than relying on implicit methods. One way is to point out the similarities between languages. Politeness is important in English too.

Some classroom practices which could be adopted include: teaching conversational openings and closings, conversational organization and discourse markers, active listening (recipient tokens), and specific speech acts such as requests, complaints, refusal, and compliments.

Participants spent time analyzing request sequences in a set of authentic email messages which sparked a discussion that concluded with a number of ideas for useful ways of working with students on their own pragmatically competent English email messages.

Reported by Wilma Luth

Bio: Gabriele Kasper is Professor of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, where she teaches in Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition, M.A. in Second Language Studies, and Advanced Graduate Certificate in Second Language Studies programs. Her most recent books are Misunderstanding in Social Life: Discourse Approaches to Problematic Talk (House, Kasper, & Ross, Longman/Pearson Education, 2003), Pragmatic Development in a Second Language (Kasper & Rose, Blackwell, 2002), and Pragmatics in Language Teaching (Rose & Kasper, Cambridge University Press, 2001). She is currently the North American editor of Applied Linguistics.