MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING HUE UNIVERSITY OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES -------- TRAN THI DIEU HUONG TEACHERS’ PERCEPTION OF DEVELOPING PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE FOR GRADE 11 STUDENTS IN SPEAKING CLASS AT SOME HIGH SCHOOLS IN QUANGBINH MA THESIS IN THEORY AND METHODOLOGY OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING CODE: 60. HOANG TINH BAO HUE, 2017 ii BỘ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO ĐẠI HỌC HUẾ TRƯỜNG ĐẠI HỌC NGOẠI NGỮ -------- TRẦN THỊ DIỆU HƯƠNG NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ NHẬN THỨC CỦA GIÁO VIÊN VỀ VIỆC PHÁT TRIỂN NGỮ DỤNG HỌC CHO HỌC SINH LỚP 11 TRONG GIỜ HỌC NÓI TẠI MỘT VÀI TRƯỜNG THPT TẠI QUẢNG BÌNH LUẬN VĂN THẠC SỸ LÝ LUẬN VÀ PHƯƠNG PHÁP DẠY HỌC BỘ MÔN TIẾNG ANH MÃ SỐ: 60.11 NGƯỜI HƯỚNG DẪN KHOA HỌC: TS. HOÀNG TỊNH BẢO HUẾ, 2017 iii STATEMENT OF ORIGINALITY This work has not previously been submitted for a degree or diploma in any university. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the thesis itself.
Date: 09/ 12/ 2017 iv ABSTRACT The present study aims at investigating the importance of developing the pragmatic competence for grade 11 students in speaking class at some high schools in QuangBinh. It was carried out in order to collect information about teacher‘s perception of pragmatic competence in speaking class, of its signification and the importance of developing pragmatic competence. Results from the data analysis show that there are many advantages and difficulties for teachers when teaching pragmatic competence in speaking class; besides, both teachers and students were aware of the important role of pragmatic competence in communication. However, the perception of pragmatic competence was not complete and they found that they mostly could not apply this knowledge in real life communication.
From the findings of the study, some suggestions are made to improve the quality of teaching and learning, especially teachers‘ perception of developing pragmatic competence for students in speaking class. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my deep gratitude to my supervisor at Hue University of Foreign Languages for his constant help, precious advice, and enlightening guidance, and especially his valuable corrections during the reading of this manuscript. I am grateful to all 50 teachers at 15 high schools in QuangBinh province for their useful lectures and instructions, which lay the foundation for this study. My sincere thanks are due to the teachers from ESP Department of HUFL who offered me great help and precious advice without which I could not have finished the paper.
Finally, I owe the completion of this study to my family for their words of encouragement throughout the time I worked on this study. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS SUB COVER PAGE .ii SUB COVER PAGE (in Vietnamese). iii STATEMENT OF AUTHORSHIP. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS.
vii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS. ix LIST OF TABLES. Background and rationale for the study. Scope of the study.
Structure of the thesis .3 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW. The concept of pragmatics. What is pragmatics?. What is pragmatic competence?.
How can we develop pragmatic competence? Can it be taught?. The adoption of the pragmatic competence in high school in Vietnam. Pragmatic competence in speaking classroom. Speech act theory.
What are speech acts?. Speech act classification. Why should speech acts be taught?. Definition of speaking skill.
Characteristics of speaking skill. Importance of spoken language. Topic of speech event. Setting of speech events.
Participants involved in speech event. Teaching pragmatics to high school students in Vietnam and raising their awareness of pragmatic competence. Study the course book .34 CHAPTER 4: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION. Information about teachers.
Information about pragmaticcompetence. Post-questionnaire on pragmatics competence. Teachers‘ perception towards teaching pragmatic competence in speaking class. Advantages of including pragmatic knowledge in speaking class.
Difficulties of teaching pragmatic competence in speaking class. Useful activities to teach pragmatics .45 CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS .57 viii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS EFL: English as a Foreign Language L1: First Language L2: Second Language ix LIST OF TABLES Table 3.1: Fifty teacher participants from 15 high schools in Quang Binh.1: Teacher‘s personal information.2: Most important skill .5: Skills in teaching pragmatics .4: Pragmatics related knowledge .6: Activities in teaching pragmatics .7: Word choice depending on different factors.8: Teaching ―Making requests‖ .10: Reaction to learning pragmatics .11: Reaction to teaching pragmatics. Background and rationale for the study In the old days in Vietnam, English was not paid much attention to at school when students often learnt a lot of grammar, vocabulary and mainly practiced reading and writing skills. Students were not used to practicing speaking skill and listening skill, or using appropriate utterances in the right contexts.
However, Vietnam has recently been developing and integrating into the world; so English and has become an important means of communication. Together with the improvement of communicative skills, pragmatics competence - speaking in context has been paid more attention to. Teachers and students are expected to know how to use English in daily communication tactfully. At school, due to time limitation, teachers can hardly coverall the knowledge in textbooks, they, therefore, often teach the main points only, for example, vocabulary or main structures in the lesson.
Many teachers fail to teach structure usage in suitable contexts, i. pragmatics competence, which results in distorting students‘ communication naturally and authentically. Take the conversation between one adult and one child, for example. They are greeting one another.
- Adult: Hi, Nam. How are you? - Child: Hi Uncle. I'm fine, thank you. And you? The child violates the politeness in this speech act.
Why does this situation happen? It is because teachers do not teach students how to greet people differently depending on their age for the sake of politeness. The child said "Hi‖ because in class, teachers use drills of greetings and teaches him to use ―hi‖ to greet people but forget to mention the age of the interlocutors. Thus we can see that the structure taught in context is extremely important. In other words, teachers‘ awareness and way to teach students pragmatics is extremely 1 important and necessary.
If teachers do not teach children language in context, students will not know how to say it right in appropriate contextx. And here is another example: An old lady was strolling through the park when she saw Jamie with a dog. - ―Does your dog bite?‖, she asked. When the old lady tried to pet the dog, it almost bit her finger off.
―I think you say your dog doesn't bite!‖, screamed the old lady with blood dripping from her hand. ―That‘s right‖, answered Jamie. ―My dog doesn‘t bite, but that‘s not my dog‖. In this story, whose fault is it when the old lady is bitten by the dog? Obviously, the dog mentioned here is different.
Jamie informed less than what the old lady expected and the old lady understood more than what was informed. The old lady thought the dog belonged to Jamie without Jamie‘s confirmation. These illustrations reveal that pragmatics is very important in our everyday life, and of course in learning language at school. Because pragmatics is the study of how people use language, it describes the connection between language and human life.
It is important to learn about the pragmatic conventions of English so as to be able to make full use of the words you know and to avoid mistakes. This domain has motivated me a lot and therefore, I have chosen the topic ―Teachers‘ perception of developing Pragmatic Competence for grade 11 students in speaking class at some high schools in QuangBinh‖ for my Master thesis. Research aims This study aims: - To investigate into teachers‘ perception of developing Pragmatic Competence for students in speaking class. 2 - To find some problems and suggest measures, and apply activities in classroom to improve students‘ pragmatic competence through English speaking class in high schools in QuangBinh.
Research questions This research attempts to answer the following questions: 1. What is the teachers‘ perception of developing pragmatic competence in speaking class? 2. How do teachers develop pragmatic competence in speaking class to Grade 11 students at some high schools in QuangBinh? 3. Which activities help students raise their awareness of pragmatics in learning English? 1.
Scope of the study This research describes in detail the research including an overview of the current situation of the teachers and students dealing with pragmatic competence. Besides, it explores the reasons, the goals and activities of teaching pragmatic competence in speaking class. It also emphasizes some problems and suggests measures to teaching pragmatic competence in high schools in QuangBinh. This scope is within a case of grade 11 students only.
Structure of the thesis This thesis consists of five main chapters plus the Appendix and References. Chapter One: Introduction – provides a brief introduction of the background, the rationale and the aim of the study. It also presents the research questions, the scope and the structure of the thesis. Chapter Two: Literature Review – aims to review literature related to the study, presenting definitions of pragmatics, pragmatic competence, speech act theory and speaking skill.
3 Chapter Three: Methodology – presents the research participants, research procedures, and procedure of data collection and analysis. Chapter Four: Findings and Discussions – presents principal findings from analysis of the data collected. Chapter Five: Conclusion – includes a summary of the study, and suggestions for further research. 4 CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW 2.
The concept of pragmatics 2. What is pragmatics? The term Pragmatics was first introduced into English in the early 1950s from the word pragmaticus in Latin and pragmatikós in Greek, which both meant practical. Pragmatics was originally used to refer to the practical considerations about a subject or matter. Over more than four decades, pragmatics has developed into an interesting but challenging domain of linguistics which studies the meaning in context, especially focusing on how situational context.
There are three dominant schools in Pragmatics: the Anglo-American school, the Continental school, and the Asian ethno-pragmatics school. + The Anglo-American school views Pragmatics as a central area which somewhat overlaps with Semantics; + The European school of Pragmatics emphasizes the functional nature of language use; + The Asian ethno-pragmatics school reflects the view of a growing body of literature. In Stalnaker‘s(1972) work, pragmatics is ―the study of linguistic acts and the contexts in which they are performed‖ (p. Crystal (1985) shares the same point of view about pragmatics with Stalnaker (1972) when defining pragmatics as ―the study of language from the point of view of the users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction, and the effects their use of language has on the other participants in an act of communication‖ (p.
In the same vein, Yule (1996) defines pragmatics through a precise description of four concerned areas that pragmatics is ―the study of speaker meaning‖, the study of what the speaker means and intends by his utterance. 5 In fact, pragmatics is the study of the aspects of meaning and language use that are dependent on the speaker, the addressee and other features of the context of utterance. However, in Vietnam, pragmatics is the subject that is taught to English major students or MA students so many teachers at high school do not take notice of it when teaching English. What is pragmatic competence? Pragmatic Competence refers to the ability to use language appropriately in different social situations.
It is true to say that there is no correct way to use language; however, we can certainly define what appropriate usage of language in different circumstances is. Pragmatic competence is a fundamental aspect of a more general communicative competence. What do we mean by different circumstances? Below are some ways to differentiate circumstances: • Purposes for communicating, often referred to as functions, e.