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.