Lesson 4: Pragmatics and Proficiency Levels

Teachability of Pragmatics

Introduction to Lesson 4

Duration: 00:22

Transcript-

I wanted to put this fourth lesson in on proficiency levels because my students in my applied linguistics classes always ask, "Isn’t pragmatics only for students who are at the advanced levels of proficiency?" So here we look at how teachable or how learnable pragmatics is, what can be expected more or less from students of different levels, and how their production can be evaluated.

A question that often arises is when in the curriculum pragmatics should be taught. Can and should we teach pragmatics to beginning students, or should we wait until the students have already gained some mastery of the vocabulary and grammar? Can learners do these language functions and understand implicatures (things implied) at a fairly low level of proficiency?

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Pragmatics teachability issues are discussed.

Duration: 01:44


Learners can be quite adept at inferring meanings, but expressing implicatures effectively usually requires more linguistic skill in the target language. The two processes of inference and implicature are quite different.

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