Pragmatic awareness activities

Abstract

This paper advocates a language awareness approach which aims at helping learners of an L2 to develop awareness of how the target language is typically used to achieve communication. It starts by considering different interpretations of the objectives and procedures of language awareness lessons and then specifies the particular principles and objectives of the Pragmatic Awareness Approach. In doing so it stresses that pragmatic awareness can be achieved by exposing learners to language in use in such a way that they are guided to invest energy and attention in order to make discoveries for themselves. These discoveries can help learners when participating in planned discourse. They can also contribute to the learner readiness required for language acquisition by encouraging learners to note the gap between their use of the target language and that of proficient users. In addition, the discovery activities help learners to develop cognitive skills and to gain more independence as language learners. The main part describes an example of a pragmatic awareness lesson for upper intermediate students based on an extract from The Graduate by Charles Webb. In this lesson the learners are guided to make discoveries about how the interrogative and the imperative are actually used in English and about how interaction between context and language form is used to achieve illocu‐tionary force. The paper concludes with an outline of typical procedures in a pragmatic awareness lesson and with a summary of the potential value of a pragmatic awareness approach.