THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT PROJECT IN PRAGMATICS
Teacher responses to phase one
Gains in substantive and syntactic knowledge
The process of actually identifying and coding features in the data, together with the inevitable uncertainties and discussion, allowed the teachers to develop their own understanding of the mitigating devices used, and to identify patterns in the language of native speakers. The teachers often found the application of the coding categories to the data challenging, as it took them beyond their normal domain of the classroom into relatively uncharted territory. However, these struggles with uncertainty also gave them a deeper appreciation of the issues and were therefore particularly rewarding in the long term:
B: I think the analysis was the hardest part because you really had to concentrate on what you were doing.
C: [...}I think the coding was difficult, I think y’know we had lots of long conversations about whether it was this code or that code, and the feeling that um y’know am I doing this consistently? With myself let alone with the other people in the group, and it was useful to go to the sessions and talk about...and look at how other people coded, [...]
E: The coding was challenging; the coding was the challenging thing. It was good having those meetings and realizing that everybody else was having the same problems.
In discussing content knowledge, Shulman (1986) emphasized that teachers should not only know the facts (the substantive knowledge), but also be able to explain why (the syntactic knowledge or why knowledge is constructed in this way). In this project, the idea behind involving teachers in empirical research was to develop not only their conscious knowledge of the language features used in mitigation, but also to increase their awareness of why and how these phenomena are used. As noted above, as native speakers of a language tend to be socialized into the pragmatic norms of their community as children, and their knowledge of such norms are likely to be below the level of consciousness. The tendency of language programs to eschew the teaching of pragmatic skills (and thus for teacher training programs to similarly ignore them) means that teachers’ conscious awareness of these important interpersonal features of language is often limited. The teachers were all very clear that their substantive knowledge of the area had been considerably extended:
A: [We got] a much better understanding of the particular area we were focusing on which was the whole area of mitigation and a much better understanding of you know what we do in Australia and why we do it …
B: I think that because I was actually doing the project and looking at, seeing those dialogues with people and then analyzing it - it just made me focus a lot more rather than going to a conference and listening to what someone else has done and said. I don’t think it would have been as real and practical to me doing it
This awareness included an increased sensitivity to the whole notion that when we speak we present ourselves and manage the impressions that others have of us:
B: That the way that you use, that the phrases that you choose, you know, communicate quite a lot more, you know, to the person listening to you, um, how polite you are, you know how you make your request, how people understand you and things
Teachers also gained a more detailed understanding of the linguistic devices that native speakers use when negotiating a complex request, and the cultural values that underlie the roles and obligations in different requesting situations. Some were particularly struck by the amount of preparation that speakers undertake before making the request:
A: Well, one thing I think I am more aware of is how early the non-native speakers start preparing, for that sort of request or whatever it is, you know, it starts...a lot...earlier, you know, there’s a lot more sort of build-up or preamble
The teachers were also able to articulate the ways in which their experiences during the project enabled them to understand how and why the mitigating features they found in the data worked, that is, their gains in what Shulman calls syntactic knowledge:
A: [...] So it has raised my awareness on all sorts of levels on the area we were looking at, on the area of mitigation and making requests. You know, I couldn’t have told you before – I could have given you what we say, but not, I hadn’t really thought about why we say for example, why you put some requests in the past tense or varying other mitigating language. I’ve never really thought about why we do that. It’s made me much more conscious of that and much more conscious of the importance of looking at the staging and all those things.
As this teacher goes on to explain, the process of being involved in research enabled her to understand the area of mitigation as a system of choices that speakers make rather than simply a list of items to learn, and to appreciate the motivation for such choices:
A: I really don’t think I’d thought a lot about the role of things like how you can really change things ....... it’s not simple formulaic phrases - that we are making all sorts of choices not consciously but subconsciously, and they can have, you know, and when you actually look at them you can see why we’ve done that but you wouldn’t have known that you were even doing that in your own language....
Their increased understanding of both the linguistic and the cultural aspects of this area of interpersonal pragmatics also impacted strongly on their pedagogical and curricular knowledge. This is discussed below.
