Why Teachers Don’t Use Their Pragmatic Awareness
CONCLUSION
L2 learners should have enough pragmatic competence to allow them to choose pragmatically-preferred forms. The data yielded by the three different methods employed in this study were analyzed qualitatively to try to pinpoint the reasons why teachers’ practice did not change after the awareness-raising program was offered. None of the lessons observed lacked situations in which feedback in Pragmatics could have been provided. It is quite evident that the teacher-training program used in this research did not bring about any sort of change in teachers’ performance as far as CF in Pragmatics is concerned.
I hypothesize that such failure could be put down to three possible factors:
1) In order for the course to be effective in making teachers aware of Pragmatics, it must be longer, happen on a regular basis and get the teachers more involved with it.viii That way, teachers would be reminded of Pragmatics every so often and its importance would be less likely to be played down.
2) The classroom setting is too contrived and artificial to allow for genuinely communicative interaction to take place. As a result, the need for appropriate pragmatic knowledge is not realized by the teacher (no matter how much Pragmatics he/she actually knows).
3) Exposure might be a key point in the development of interlanguage Pragmatics. Thus, no matter how rich the course is, what teachers really need is not merely becoming aware of Pragmatics, but learning about the target culture by experiencing it (spending some time in an English-speaking country). Having said that, my foreign friends in Britain come back to my mind. Why did most of them not acquire the pragmatic knowledge they needed to function well in an English-speaking environment? If exposure is really the answer, how much exposure would be needed to guarantee improvement?
If I were to carry out this investigation again, I would first of all try to observe more informants over a longer period of time, during which awareness-raising programs like the one in this study would be offered once a term. It would also be useful to have a control group whose program did not single out CF as an instructional tool, as happened to the informants in this investigation, and a treatment group that was shown all the possible benefits of CF in Pragmatics to check whether the latter group would by the end of the program provide more CF in Pragmatics than the former. It would also probably be helpful to discuss with the participants the situations in which learners could have received CF but did not. This might help them (and us) to understand whether not providing CF is a conscious choice or the result of the errors going unnoticed. Finally, I would seek inter-rater reliability by having other raters go through the data as well, which was not possible in this study due to the limited funding this research received.
On a final note, I would like to add that the data obtained through the lesson observation have made me look into my own teaching practice. Surprisingly, I have found out that I also restrain at times from providing feedback in Pragmatics. Whenever I miss an opportunity for correcting learners in Pragmatics I try to identify the reasons why I myself am not offering CF in that specific situation. I believe that basically I do not always provide learners with this type of feedback firstly because I want to save the learners’ face and secondly because no matter how communicative the classroom environment is, my learners and I share Portuguese as a mother tongue and do not need another set of Pragmatic rules to guide our interactions. If this explanation is right, no matter how well prepared the teachers are (whether through refresher courses or through exposure), CF in Pragmatics will only make sense in an ESL scenario, never in an EFL context. It would actually be interesting to examine how native teachers, who are pragmatically competent, would deal with this question in an ESL situation. Would they provide CF in Pragmatics since their learners would not share their backgrounds amongst themselves or with the teacher? Would they withhold it for face reasons? Or would they not provide it because the classroom is not a truly communicative setting?
This research has been only the first step towards clarification of the issue. CF at the pragmatic level remains a very rich area for investigation. Longitudinal research, I believe, might be able to provide more answers than this study can. The more tangible answers are found to the questions raised here, the more SLA will be able to help teachers in the difficult task of preparing their learners to be communicatively competent speakers of an L2.
viii The teachers in this study could possibly have been more involved if they had chosen to take part in the research (and attend the awareness-raising program) rather being appointed by the school’s head teacher.
