What would you say in these situations?

• You need a day off from work to go to a meeting at your child’s school. Ask your boss for a day off.

• You had car problems and are 20 minutes late for work. Tell your boss you are sorry.

Adult ELL response prior to instruction

You need a day off from work to go to a meeting at your child’s school. Ask your boss for a day off. (Request)

“I need day off because I go to school my son.”*

You had car problems and are 20 minutes late for work. Tell your boss you are sorry. (Apology)

“I’m sorry because my car accident.”*

(Unedited responses from a learner with a CASAS score of 191-210.)

Pragmatics

Understanding more than what is said or written through linguistic and social cues.

“Having pragmatic ability means being able to go beyond the literal meaning of what is said or written, in order to interpret the meaning, assumptions, purposes or goals, and the kinds of actions that are being performed.”

Ishihara & Cohen, 2010; Yule, 1996

L2 pragmatics in the low-level ABE ELL classroom

• Many ELLs in ABE programs communicate with their speech communities early in their language acquisition process due to work or family obligations.

• Most pragmatics research and materials development involves unversity-level or higher-level students.

• Although low-level learners do not have the meta-language to analyze and talk about pragmatics, in general they can distinguish between polite/rude, positive/negative, friendly/unfriendly, etc.

Materials development project

• Created lessons and materials that focused on five different speech acts within a “workplace” theme. Lessons were designed to:

– increase learners’ awareness to pragmatic norms in the workforce;

– To help learners begin noticing how certain speech acts are performed;

– To help learners communicate more effectively early in their language acquisition process.

Developing the materials

• Identified 5 different speech acts within the workplace theme• Wrote scenarios to elicit speech samples from native English

speakers through a Discourse Completion Task (DCT)• Compiled those responses• Administered a pretest DCT to learners• Wrote five lesson plans with differentiation features (included

audio recordings done with a ‘flip camera’)• Administered a posttest DCT to learners

Designing the lessons

Lessons included:

• vocabulary building techniques• sound recordings• language analysis activities• explicit instruction• awareness raising tasks• controlled practice• communicative practice

Request lesson plan

Apologies lesson plan

On-line resources

• CARLA - Speech acts and pragmatics

http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/index.html

Practical teaching suggestions and lesson plans for teaching pragmatics

http://exchanges.state.gov/englishteaching/resforteach/pragmatics.html

Pre- and post- test responses (Unedited responses from learners with CASAS score of 191-210.)

“I need day off because I go to school my son.”

“I’m sorry because my car accident.”

“I am sorry. I need a day off from work, because I have a meeting at my child’s school. Can you help me?”

“I am so sorry, my car has problems. I would like late for work 20 minutes. Thank you very much.”