Pragmatics in Teaching

Oral Communication in
Context: An
Observational Study
BY: JESSA M. MOLINA
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Rationale
Introduction
Research Questions
Theoretical Bases
Methods
Rationale:
Communication is a vital enabler of effective and productive human interactions and
engagements. According to Saunders and Mills (1999), there are four main skills involved in
communication engagements by individuals, listening, speaking, reading, and writing, and that the
effectiveness of the process of communication is heavily dependent on the extent of shared
understanding of the contexts in which the communication takes place. Language may be
employed to negotiate teaching/learning encounters and the way language is used depends on a
wide range of contextual interdependencies. However, teachers have to deal with different
complexities in communication in dealing with the students, the tasks involved in teaching
curricular content, and developing or enhancing communicative proficiency.
As to refer on the aims of this study, how can teachers learn more about these complexities and
process of interaction so that they can enhance their skills when engaging students in schools?
To address the question, this paper aims to find out the complex relationship between pragmatic
approach of teachers in connection with students’ performance through observation. The data that
will be gathered will illustrate the potential of teachers’ pragmatic awareness to bring out positive
systemic change that influences a variety of factors in a classroom setting.
Rationale:
Second, observing and analyzing the language that teachers and students use in
context, the manner of conveying the intended meaning and the decoded
interpretation of students based on their understanding, how they create and
understand meanings, will be the focus of this paper to describe how pragmatic is
important to understanding and how learning is realized through language.
As a viable solution to these concerns, the finding of this research will be of great
value as a reliable source of empirical evidence and insights to revealing the
effect of teacher’s pragmatic approach in the over-all performance of students.
And to draw findings about complexity and process of interaction so that they can
enhance their skills when engaging students in schools and subsequently, leading
to greater benefit in terms of the professional development.
Introduction
• Bachman‘s (1990) specific conception of pragmatic competence can be assumed to have
paved the way for the escalation of interactive characteristics of language teaching.
However, Achiba (2003) reports the scarcity of studies on the development of pragmatics.
Thus, further research is required to explore how to provide teachers and learners with
enough opportunities to benefit from effective input.
• Despite numerous policy attempts by the educational system in to improve on the
teaching and learning of English in the country, The outcome of such programs continues
to be characterized by low achievement or unsatisfactory and far below the expectations.
This is evident on the previous English Proficiency Index (EPI) which Philippines ranked
14th place in 2018 to 20th place in 2020.
• According to Shahbaz and Khan (2017), the problem can be blamed on a variety of
factors, and one of these factors is lack of effective training of teachers to ensure their
context-specific proficiency that can lead to compromising the effectiveness of formal
communication between teachers and students.
Introduction
Perspective of learning-teaching processes (Saunders and Mills 1999) described as the
conveyance of a message by the teacher to a student or a classroom in the most efficient way,
sending the appropriate message, and incorporating the resulting messages into common
pedagogic knowledge and understanding. Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford (1996) and Rose (1997)
suggest that if teachers are encouraged to think about culturally appropriate ways to use the
language in communication, then these learners will be able to easily grasp the intended
meaning during discussion and become aware of their own abilities for pragmatic analyses.
The study of pragmatics and its major areas like; conversational implicature, cooperative theory,
pragmatic, pragma-linguistic, socio-pragmatic competence, is necessarily but a difficult and
complex challenge in a language classroom, but it is important to consider the importance of this
field to identify drawbacks in communication between teachers and students. Rueda (2006)
believes that the role of instruction may be to furnish the learners with knowledge of the socio-
cultural rules but that can only be done if educators realized that ‘language in use’ is highly
context dependent that should purposely serve students not themselves.
Research This paper aims to answer the following
questions:
Questions • What are the conversational implicature used by
teachers during the discussion in Oral Communication
in Context and how they affect the understanding of
meaning on the part of students ?
• What are the cooperative principles applied and how
do teachers convey them during the teaching process?
• What are the pragmatic, pragma-linguistic, and socio-
pragmatics competence of teachers in teaching oral
communication in context and how they affect the
performance of students?
• What are the complexities in the teacher-student over-
all communication process?
 Conversational Implicature: Kent Bach (1994:284)
THEORETICAL Pragmatics conversational implicature is an indirect or
BASES implicit speech act : what is meant by
speaker’s utterance that is not part of what is explicitly said.  
a

Cooperative Principle: Grice (1989:26)

In Grice’s theory of cooperative principle, participants in a
communicative exchange are guided by a principle that
determines the way in which language is used with maximum
efficiency and effect to achieve rational communication.

Pragmatic Competence: Koike (1989: 279)

The speaker’s knowledge and use of rules of appropriateness
and politeness, which dictate the way the speaker will
understand and formulate speech acts
THEORETICAL
BASES Pragma-linguistic competence: Leech (1983: 11)
The resources which a language provides for conveying a
particular illocution. It requires mapping form, meaning, force and
sometimes context, as in the use of pragmatic strategies, pre-
packaged routines, hedging and indirectness to intensify or soften
the communicative intent.

Socio-pragmatic Competence: Thomas (1983: 91)

Socio-pragmatic competence to be largely concerned with the
sociological interface of the language; it involves the teachers and
learners’ system of beliefs as well as their knowledge of the
language. Harlow (1990: 1) refers to it as the “ability to vary
speech act strategies according to the situational variables in the
act of communication.”
METHODS
Research Design:
-To achieve the research aims and objectives of this study, a descriptive in
qualitative method will be utilize. This choice of the qualitative research design
here was informed by the fact that compared to quantitative research design, a
qualitative design is hailed for offering detailed, in-depth prescriptions of the
opinions, ideas, and experiences, while accounting for the influence of contextual
factors (Rahman, 2016).
Population and Participants :
-The target population of this study comprised of Sr. High School students and
English teachers in Pasay City South High.
Data Collection:
-To enhance the richness of the study data, the researcher will be using checklist
and observation method.
Sampling Technique:
- Purposive Sampling Technique
Data Analysis:
- Discourse Analysis
REFERENCES
 Achiba, M. (2003) Learning to request in a second language. Clevedon [England]:
Multilingual Matters.
Bardovi-Harlig, K. (2016) ‘Pragmatics and second language acquisition’, in Kaplan,
R. (ed.) The Handbook of Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.
232–243.
Bardovi-Harlig, K. and Hartford, B.S. (1996) ‘Input in an institutional setting’,
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18(02), p. 171. doi:
10.1017/s027226310001487x.
Grice, P. (1989) Logic and conversation. In Studies in the way of words, pp. 3-21,
Harvard University Press. 3 Grice, P. (1989) Meaning. In Studies in the way of
words, pp. 213-223, Harvard University Press.
Thomas, J. (1983) ‘Cross-cultural pragmatic failure’, Applied Linguistics, 4(2), pp.
91– 112. doi: 10.1093/applin/4.2.91.
REFERENCES
Khan, I. A. (2011). Learning difficulties in English: Diagnosis and pedagogy in Saudi
Arabia. Educational Research, 2(7), 1248-1257. ISSN: 2141-5161
Koike, D.A. (1989) ‘Requests and the role of deixis in politeness’, Journal of
Pragmatics, 13(2), pp. 187–202. doi: 10.1016/0378-2166(89)90010-5.
Leech, G. (1983) Principles of pragmatics. Routledge.
Rueda, Y. (2006) ‘Developing pragmatic competence in a foreign language’,
Colombian Applied Linguistics Journal, 8, pp. 169–182.
Saunders, S. & Mills, M. (1999). The knowledge of communication skills of
secondary graduate student teachers and their understanding of the relationship
between communication skills and teaching. Retrieved Feb, 4, 2010.
Shahbaz, M. & Khan, R. M. I. (2017). Use of mobile immersion in foreign language
teaching to enhance target language vocabulary learning. MIER Journal of
Educational Studies, Trends and Practices, 7(1).