In this presentation, we discuss the use of spoken corpora for the development of materials for the teaching of pragmatic routines. Pragmatic routines are linguistic realizations of social conventions that form part of a speaker’s pragmatic competence. Pragmatic routines often indicate what speech act is being performed. For example, pragmatic routines such as That’s right, You’re right, That’s true, and I agree signal agreements, and Yeah, but and I agree, but signal disagreements. Kasper and Blum-Kulka (1993) have observed that pragmatic routines may be a source of difficulty for second language learners.

One of the challenges in the instruction of pragmatics has been the well-known lack of pragmatic authenticity in commercially available materials. Textbooks often display pragmatic routines in highlighted boxes headed by a banner similar to “useful expressions,” without also providing the contexts in which they occur. Learners need to know the contexts in order to be able to use the expressions, and it is often left to teachers to supplement these materials. Authentic materials are important in the teaching of pragmatics, but until recently teachers have been on their own.

In our presentation, we demonstrate how teachers can use a corpus or various corpora to develop pragmatically appropriate teaching materials and illustrate the principles of working with pragmatic routines (Bardovi-Harlig, Mossman, & Vellenga, 2014a). These steps include

• selecting the corpus,
• identifying expressions,
• extracting examples,
• preparing corpus excerpts for teaching,
• developing noticing activities, and
• developing production activities.
  
  

SELECTING THE CORPUS

The first stage in developing materials is to selectacorpus appropriate to the goals of the instruction. We introduce participants to three types of spoken corpora: an academic corpus (The Michigan Corpus of Academic English, MICASE), a conversation corpus (The Santa Barbara Corpus, SBCSAE), and a television corpus (Compleat Lexical Tutor: TV-Marlise). An academic corpus is ideal for academic purposes programs such as the EAP context in which we teach. Both the conversational corpus and the TV corpus offer examples of social talk. All of the corpora are free and easily accessible and can be used by teachers with ease after a brief online introduction.

IDENTIFYING EXPRESSIONS

Candidate pragmatic routines can be identified in at least three ways: L2 textbooks, research, and local data collection or observation. We will concentrate on starting with a textbook to identify common and useful pragmatic routines in a corpus.

EXTRACTING EXAMPLES AND PREPARING CORPUS EXCERPTS FOR TEACHING

The goal for teaching is to select relatively clear examples of the pragmatic routines in context that can be followed without reading the entire transcript, that have relatively comprehensible topics, and that include an unambiguous use of the expression and a clear referent. Not all authentic examples are immediately recognizable to students; we will demonstrate how to select examples and modify them to make them maximally useful. Following simple guidelines, teachers can build a bank of examples that can be used in a variety of ways.

DEVELOPING NOTICING ACTIVITIES

Once the examples have been collected and prepared, instructors can develop activities to help learners notice the use, form, and contrasts between expressions. The availability of the transcripts and accompanying audio or video from the websites or other sources allows teachers to provide a variety of input for noticing. The written transcripts allow students to take their time with the language sample and read the passages more than once. To complement this, the aural or audiovisual companion input provides the authentic speed, prosody, and full contextualization of production.

DEVELOPING PRODUCTION ACTIVITIES

Opportunities for production are important for the use of pragmatic routines in conversation. Production allows learners to notice the gap between what they want to say and what they can say. Production activities can be ordered from more to less supported; learners might draw a card in a board game or take a “turn” in a television show and compare their answers to the original.

Learners can be quite successful at learning pragmatic routines in the classroom using such materials, demonstrating both increased clarity of speech act production and the use of instructed pragmatic routines (Bardovi-Harlig, Mossman, & Vellenga, 2014b).

REFERENCES

Bardovi-Harlig, K., Mossman, S., & Vellenga, H. E. (2014a). Developing corpus-based materials to teach pragmatic routines. TESOL Journal. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1002/tesj.177

Bardovi-Harlig, K., Mossman, S., & Vellenga, H. E. (2014b). The effect of instruction on pragmatic routines in academic discussion. Language Teaching Research. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1177/1362168814541739

Kasper, G., & Blum-Kulka, S. (1993).Interlanguage pragmatics: An introduction. In G. Kasper & S. Blum-Kulka (Eds.), Interlanguage pragmatics (pp. 1–17). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.

Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig is professor of second language studies at Indiana University, where she teaches and conducts research on second language acquisition, L2 pragmatics, and tense-aspect systems. Her work on pragmatics has appeared in Language Learning, SSLA, and Intercultural Pragmatics. She is coeditor of Interlanguage Pragmatics (Erlbaum) and Teaching Pragmatics.

Sabrina Mossman is a graduate student pursuing a PhD in second language studies at Indiana University. She has more than 20 years of experience in ESL teaching and curriculum development in the United States and Mexico. Her research interests include L2 pragmatics and semantics.

Their joint work on teaching pragmatics has appeared in Language Teaching Research and TESOL Journal.