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Teaching pragmatic awareness of request strategies
Author
Green, Nicola H.
Supervisor
Silver, Rita
Abstract
Pragmatic competence is an area that is often overlooked in the language classroom, yet pragmatic failure is a frequent cause of communicative failure in a target language. This study looks at the pragmatic awareness of request strategies in English by Japanese native speakers, and measures the rise in pragmatic awareness as a result of a series of specific teaching sessions. The subjects were 17 Japanese junior high school students at a Japanese school in Singapore. They were divided into three groups depending on their experience of residency, that is length of time spent residing in a target language environment. the subjects were given a Discourse Completion Task in two parts: part one included open-ended request and apology situations; part two contained multiple-choice request and apology acceptability judgements. The subjects were then given a series of six lessons aimed at raising their pragmatic awareness of request strategies. the DCT was re-administered during the following lesson with changes to the order of items.
Results from the pre-treatment DCT indicated that the subjects were aware of appropriate request language and were able to discern when a high or low imposition request was being used, and alter their request language accordingly. However the subjects did not seem aware of how to construct a complete request. The groups with more extended experience of residency tended to use more lower imposition, speaker-dominant requests than their less experienced peers. Extended residency experience led to the production of more multiple than single sentence requests even if these multiple sentence requests did not constitute a complete request formula. After treatment there was a marked all round improvement in the awareness of appropriate request strategies, regardless of residency experience, although the group with limited residency experience made the most marked improvement.
Results from the pre-treatment DCT indicated that the subjects were aware of appropriate request language and were able to discern when a high or low imposition request was being used, and alter their request language accordingly. However the subjects did not seem aware of how to construct a complete request. The groups with more extended experience of residency tended to use more lower imposition, speaker-dominant requests than their less experienced peers. Extended residency experience led to the production of more multiple than single sentence requests even if these multiple sentence requests did not constitute a complete request formula. After treatment there was a marked all round improvement in the awareness of appropriate request strategies, regardless of residency experience, although the group with limited residency experience made the most marked improvement.
Date Issued
2001
Call Number
PE1128 Gre
Date Submitted
2001