Researching the Effectiveness of Professional Development in Pragmatics
PRAGMATICS AS CONTENT KNOWLEDGE
The question of content knowledge in the ESL classroom is a somewhat vexed one. While it would appear to be uncontroversial that teachers should know the subject matter they are teaching, the ESL profession has continually struggled against simplistic notions that native speakers of English already know the language and are, therefore, in a position to easily transform this substantive knowledge into pedagogical strategies. While such arguments are highly debatable in most areas of language and language use, they are manifestly false in relation to areas of pragmatic and sociocultural competence, where native speaker intuitions are notoriously unreliable, and research has consistently revealed native-speaker awareness of what they think they do and say to be different from what they actually do say in a social situation (e.g. Wolfson 1989). Thus the sociocultural and pragmatic knowledge that native-speaking teachers have about their own culture usually results from early socialization into the norms of that culture and is most likely to be unconscious. This makes such knowledge less amenable to analysis by the teacher, and thus less likely to receive explicit focus in the classroom.
For learners of English, or any other language, sociocultural and pragmatic competence is crucial for those communicating regularly with native speakers, who may experience communication breakdown and hostility as a result of inappropriate or inadequate use of the kinds of strategies and devices used to mediate pragmatic intent. For example, in English there are a variety of different ways to soften the impact of an utterance – through the use of various mitigating devices, such as politeness tokens, changes in modality, incorporation of softeners, or lexical choices. Communication breakdowns which result from an incomplete awareness of how these devices reflect the sociocultural and pragmatic norms of a culture are potentially more dangerous than grammatical breakdowns because they are more likely to be attributed to the learner’s personality (e.g. the learner may be perceived as bossy or arrogant or insensitive) than to a lack of linguistic sophistication. Previous research has shown that non native speakers have great difficulty in acquiring mitigation skills from exposure alone (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford 1991), and that learners benefit from explicit instruction in both the repertoire of mitigating devices available in English and in how to use them appropriately in context (Kasper and Schmidt, 1996; Bardovi-Harlig, 1999). This highlights the importance of teaching of interpersonal pragmatic skills in language programs, and to the provision of appropriate teaching materials to address these issues in the classroom. There is a burgeoning literature on the interlanguage performance of various pragmatic functions and acts for teacher education to draw on, and in her review of classroom research in interlanguage pragmatics, Kasper (2001) concludes that, overall, pragmatic aspects of language can and should be tackled explicitly in language classrooms. However, to date the silence on teacher knowledge in this area has been deafening.
Work in the area of general education has been influential in theorizing what it is that teachers know. Shulman (1986) identifies three areas as important. The first, knowledge of subject matter, includes both substantive structures, that is, the ways in which facts relate to concepts and principles, and syntactic structures, or how knowledge is established as true or false within a discipline. Pedagogical content knowledge covers the way in which ideas can be formulated and presented for teaching, and curricular content includes knowledge of materials available to learners and what they may know about the subjects at their particular level of study (Shulman: 1986:9-10).
The model of professional development used in our project attempts to address all these dimensions of teachers’ knowledge. It involves teachers in both empirical research into a substantive area of knowledge about language use, and reflective engagement with pedagogical and curricular knowledge through the development and trialing of materials based on the results of the study.
