Why Teachers Don’t Use Their Pragmatic Awareness
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Questionnaire
The questionnaire, which was answered by informants before the awareness-raising program had taken place, tried to probe teachers’ attitudes towards CF and Pragmatics. The data yielded by the responses were conflicting in that all three informants seemed to have a somewhat blurred idea of what role Pragmatics should have in their class. Their answers were quite contradictory, not making it clear whether they thought Pragmatics was important and whether in their opinion it should be taught.
The first informant rated social practices and politeness as least important in the classroom (question 1), but selected this area as one of those in which learners needed the most emphasis in instruction (question 2). According to the answer to question 3, social practices and politeness can be acquired naturally, without instruction. The opposite idea is expressed in the answer to question 5, in which the informant rates an error in Pragmatics as deserving high priority (second only to pronunciation) in correction. Having said that, in question 6 the informant says that she does not correct her learners in Pragmatics very often and justifies this answer in question 7 by saying that “for the level they are in, students produce the expected structures well”.
The analysis of the questionnaire answers by the second informant shows a high degree of contradiction. Upon reading his questionnaire, I was unsure that he had deliberately chosen to answer the questions the way he did and thought some of the answers might be a consequence of his not paying enough attention to the rubrics, suspicion which was later confirmed in the interview. Therefore, misunderstanding of the rubrics might account for some of the contradiction present in his questionnaire. However, I believe that most of the contradiction springs from a certain degree of confusion in his mind about the place that Pragmatics should occupy in his teaching. In the answer to question 1, for example, he rates social practices and politeness as deserving a lot of attention in the classroom, while in his answer to question 2 he does not select social practices and politeness as needing emphasis in instruction. The same idea is expressed in his answer to question 3, in which he states that social practices and politeness can be acquired naturally, without instruction. No priority is given to the pragmatic error in question 5, and he says in question 6 that he never corrects his learners’ pragmatic production.
The third informant’s answers to questions 1, 2, 3 and 6 in the questionnaire suggest that she regards Pragmatics as very important in second language (L2) teaching, since she rated social practices and politeness as most important in the classroom (question 1), selected social practices and politeness as needing the most emphasis in instruction (question 2), did not appoint social practices and politeness as an area that could dispense with teaching (question 3), and said she corrected her learners’ production in this area very often. However, in response to a more practical question (question 5), Pragmatics is only the third area to be given priority.
