UNIVERSITY OF GONDAR
College of Social Sciences and Humanities
Department of English Language and Literature
Postgraduate Program (MA in TEFL)
Course Name: General Linguistics as Applied to ELT (TEFL 502)
The implication of pragmatics to English language
teaching
By: Mulusew Tafete
What are the definition of
pragmatic?
• Yule (1996:127) – Pragmatics is “the study of intended speaker
meaning.”
• Leech & Short (1981:290) - Pragmatics is “the investigation into that
aspect of meaning which is derived not from the formal properties of
words, but from the way in which utterances are used and how they
relate to the context in which they are uttered.
• Levinson (1983:9) – Pragmatics is “the study of those aspects of the
relationship between language and context that are relevant to the
writing of grammars.
What are the facts that are
pragmatic deals?
• According to Korta and Perry (2006), the facts which pragmatics deals
with are the following:
A. the objective facts of the utterance ( it use who, when, where)
B. the speaker's intentions
C. beliefs of the speaker and of the text receivers
D. about social institutions, such as marriage ceremonies, courtroom
What are the principle or goal of
pragmatic?
A. language performance rather than mere cognitive skills ( speech
situations)
B. Discourse/utterance rather than sentence
C. The context of the speech – location of participants
D. speaker’s intention
E. Shared assumptions/knowledge, cultures
• Generally, The fact that interactants do not rely only on their
knowledge of the language system when they interpret meaning
What are the three types of speech
act?
1. locutionary act: is the physical act of speaking. Whether the spoken
language is acceptable by the hearer language.
2. Illocutionary act: When making an utterance the speaker always has
an intention behind it.
3. Perlocutionary act: is the intended or unintended effect that the
utterance can have on the hearer.
Generally, those three acts are the same because they embedded at
one utterance.
What are the general functions of
speech act?
• Representatives or assertive: which express the speaker’s belief that
something is true.
E.g. This is a Solomon car
• Commissives: the speaker commits himself to do an act in the future.
E.g. I’ll take you to the movies tomorrow
• Directives speech acts by which the speaker tries to get the hearer to
do something.
E.g. Why don’t you close the window?
• Expressives: the speaker expresses his psychological state towards the
hearer.
E.g. I wish a merry Christmas
• Declarations change the world by uttering something.
E.g. I now pronounce you man and wife.
Hymes (1974) proposed a model using the
mnemonic device S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G to illustrate the
key element
• S “setting” and “scene,” • K ‘‘key,”
• P “participants,” • I “instrumentalities,”
• E “ends,” • N “norms,”
• A “act sequence,” • G “genre,”
What is the implication of the use of
pragmatics in EFL classrooms?
• the main idea is to encourage learners to fit the meaning in the
context.
Example: “WHITE STORE,”
the store was only for white people only
supermarkets owned by a family with the surname White
Example: No one like me.
Unit 12 Stigma and discrimination 208
THE END
Thank you!!!
