Dublin Core
Title
The Effectiveness of Conversation Course books in Developing Learners' Pragmatic Comprehension
Abstract
The research examined an area of pragmatic competence that is rather underrepresented in the literature of interlanguage pragmatics: pragmatic comprehension. Pragmatic comprehension involves the inferential process of understanding what a speaker intends to accomplish by making utterances . The adopted theoretical framework of pragmatic processing included the comprehension of speech acts, in which the speaker tries to do something , conversational implicatures, in which the speaker expresses attitudes and feelings using indirect utterances that must be inferred by the hearer , speakers' attitudes and registers which are variation of language differing according to the degree of formality, topic, activity, work, profession and mode under discussion ; and communication key that is the tone manner, or spirit in which a speech act is carried out and attitudinal- tone index which is a potentially finite set of continua, each one labeled with a pair of antonymous keys which are super ordinate to the other terms in that continua . Although a growing body of second and foreign language (L2& FL) research has examined learners' abilities to understand speaker’s implied intentions, most previous studies have been confined to speech acts without regarding speakers' attitudes and degree of formality. The present study aimed to fill the gap by adopting a listening instrument that measures pragmatic and linguistic comprehension simultaneously. The instrument incorporated general comprehension questions along with the questions assessing comprehension of degree of formality and speaker’s attitudes. The learner’s pragmatic comprehension, operationalized as the ability to understand appropriate language and register, was compared across advanced students with different textbook backgrounds. Pearson correlation results indicate construct differences between linguistic and pragmatic comprehension.
Keywords
Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed
PeerReviewed
Date
2012-05
Extent
912