The Language Teacher
July 2000

Pragmatics in EFL Contexts

Gabriele Kasper


In discussions of how pragmatics can be integrated into English teaching in Japan, I have often encountered skepticism. In a second language context, it is argued, learners have rich exposure to the target language and ample opportunity to use it for real-life purposes. In a foreign language situation such as ELT in Japan, however, students lack the need and opportunity of genuine communication in the target language; therefore, it is nearly impossible for students to develop pragmatic ability -- the ability to interpret utterances in context, especially when what a speaker says is not the same as what the speaker means; to carry out communicative action effectively and interact successfully in different environments and with different participants.

These arguments bring me back to my own learning history as a nonnative speaker of English and language teaching professional. As a continental European with German as her native language and Danish as her second language, I started learning English in an EFL context in 1960. During nine years of compulsory ELT at a public school, my teachers were other native speakers of German, holding equivalents to MA degrees in English and state teaching certificates based on extensive theoretical and practical education in general pedagogy and foreign language teaching. They all had an excellent command of spoken and written English. During English lessons, English was the language of classroom communication rather than only an object of study. Students acquired the ability to talk and write at length about complex issues in English, but no particular focus was given to everyday interaction outside the classroom and to language functions beyond reference.

In the early 1970s, the educational debate in the Federal Republic of Germany called for a fundamental reform of school curricula. The overall educational goal was redefined as fostering in students the interest and ability to participate actively and critically in society, developing critical awareness of historical, economic, social, and political forces and engage in social transformation. Thus, when language teaching in the public schools began to 'turn pragmatic' in the early 70s, this was not an isolated movement but part and parcel of a more comprehensive reorientation of educational theory and practice. The educational reform in general and the revision of foreign language curricula in particular were strongly inspired by social philosopher Jurgen Habermas' theory of communicative competence (1971; 1984). Habermas' notion of communicative competence acquired the status of an interdisciplinary model at all levels of curricular decisions. But in order to serve as a guiding construct for foreign language teaching, the notion of communicative competence had to be specified into components that could be learnt, taught, and assessed.

In order to reevaluate the role of ELT in developing students' communicative competence in English, it was necessary to examine students' communicative ability at the end of an EFL curriculum that was not specifically oriented towards developing their pragmatic ability. This was the goal of a comprehensive research project on the pragmatic skills of German EFL learners (1976-1980; cf. Edmondson, House, Kasper, & Stemmer, 1984). We found that after nine years of instruction, these learners had the grammatical, pragmatic, and discourse ability to participate in a variety of conversational tasks, but very often their ways of speaking were not socially appropriate in the given context, their contributions did not align well with those of their conversational partners, and they transferred pragmatic and discourse strategies from German to English when such transfer was not effective. Consistent with my own experience, the students had participated in EFL instruction which was predominantly conducted in the target language, and which required that they discussed complex subject matters (such as literary texts and debate issues) in spontaneous classroom interaction. However, their EFL classes had not prepared them to participate successfully in conversations where the social (interpersonal) dimension of communication is particularly important.

Our findings thus indicated that many aspects of pragmatics in EFL settings are not automatically acquired, as a by-product of a focus on grammar and content. A number of subsequent studies have examined what opportunities for developing pragmatic ability second and foreign language classrooms afford when pragmatics is not a planned learning objective. This research shows that especially in teacher-fronted teaching, such opportunities are quite limited (Kasper, in press). Inevitably, this raises the question of whether pragmatics can be taught in foreign language classrooms -- or is pragmatics not a feasible goal to achieve through instruction, as the skeptics claim (Kasper, 1997)?

As all aspects of language learning, the issue of whether pragmatics can be taught is an empirical question that must be examined through rational inquiry. Fortunately, an increasing number of studies demonstrate that most aspects of pragmatics are quite amenable to teaching in foreign language classroom, but not all approaches to teaching pragmatics are equally effective. I will review this research in my talk (cf. Rose & Kasper, in press).

Curriculum revision is not complete without an integrated assessment component. Unless teachers also know about methods to evaluate students' progress in pragmatics, they may be reluctant to focus on pragmatics in their teaching. Fortunately, a number of assessment instruments for pragmatics is now available. At the Department of Second Language Studies (formerly ESL) at the University of Hawai'i, my colleagues J.D. Brown and Thom Hudson developed several measures of pragmatic ability, which were subsequently tested for their use in EFL (Yoshitake, 1997) and JSL contexts (Yamashita, 1996). Currently, our doctoral candidate Carsten Röver (in progress) is developing measures for web-delivered tests of pragmatics for EFL and ESL students. Finally, oral proficiency interviews, a long-standing measure of spoken ability in a foreign language, have also been examined with a view to the information they yield on candidates' pragmatic skills (Norris, in press). In my talk, I will report on the progress that has been made in the assessment of foreign language learners' pragmatic ability.

References

Brown, J.D. (in press). Pragmatics tests: Different purposes, different tests. In K.R. Rose & G. Kasper (Eds.), Pragmatics in language teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Edmondson, W., House, J., Kasper, G. & Stemmer, B. (1984). Learning the pragmatics of discourse: A project report. Applied Linguistics, 5, 113-127.

Habermas, J. (1971). Vorbereitende Bemerkungen zu einer Theorie der kommunikativen Kompetenz [Preliminary remarks on a theory of communicative competence] In J. Habermas & N. Luhmann, Theorie der Gesellschaft oder Sozialtechnologie? [Theory of society or social technology?] (pp. 101-141). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action: Vol. 1. Reason and the rationalization of society. T. McCarthy, transl. Boston: Beacon Press (Original 1981).

Hudson, T., Detmer, E. & Brown, J. D. (1995). Developing prototypic measures of cross-cultural pragmatics (Technical Report #7). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i, Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center.

Kasper, G. (1997). Can pragmatic competence be taught? (Net Work #6) [HTML document]. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i, Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center. http://www.lll.hawaii.edu/nflrc/NetWorks/NW6/ [access: 1997 April 10].

Kasper, G. (in press). Classroom research on interlanguage pragmatics. In K.R. Rose & G. Kasper (Eds.), Pragmatics in language teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Norris, J.M. (in press). Use of address terms on the German Speaking Test. In K.R. Rose & G. Kasper (Eds.), Pragmatics in language teaching. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Röver, C. (in progress). Bringing pragmatics into assessment: Development of a proficiency test of pragmatics for learners of English. Doctoral dissertation, University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

Yamashita, S. O. (1996b). Six measures of JSL Pragmatics (Technical Report #14). Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai'i, Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center.

Yoshitake, S. S. (1997). Measuring interlanguage pragmatic competence of Japanese students of English as a foreign language: A multi-test framework evaluation. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia Pacific University, Novata, CA.


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