Teachers' perceptions of the value and their practices in teaching pragmatics including the use of authentic texts

Abstract

Research shows that even learners with advanced levels of grammatical competence may still experience pragmatic difficulties (Bardovi-Harlig & Dornyei, 1998) and that some form of explicit instruction is helpful for acquisition (Kasper & Roever, 2004). The investigation was conducted in a tertiary level educational setting in Auckland. Data for the study were drawn from questionnaires and interviews with teachers from a range of academic, vocational and community focused English language programs. In this paper, we provide a summary of the objectives and design of the study and we focus on findings related to three key issues: areas in which pragmatics-focused materials are seen as lacking; barriers to teachers’ use of authentic texts in teaching pragmatics and the methods and activities teachers use in teaching pragmatics, including a range of methods and activities that are well known and some that are less well known. This research has been funded by AKO Aotearoa and it is the preliminary stage of a broader scale action research project in which teachers working as research participants develop and evaluate their own pragmatics-focused materials based on authentic listening texts.