Presenter
Virginia LoCastro
When?
Wednesday, 30 October 2013
10:30 am–12:00 pm ET
Who Should Attend?
- Students, teachers, and administrators in TESOL-related classrooms and programs
- Language education practitioners
Registration
Cost: Free for members; US$45 for nonmembers
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The often unexplored subject of pragmatics is paradoxically a very important one for students, teachers, and administrators in our contemporary world, where classrooms, workplaces, and local communities are becoming increasingly diverse. Although efforts are made in classrooms to address different cultural practices, the deeper level of everyday interactions are often ignored.
As one Pakistani friend once warned, “Centuries pass, but moments linger.” The uncomfortable moments of interaction comprise sites for awareness raising, analysis, and engagement in change.
This seminar aims to increase awareness and understanding of how human beings use language in real-life situations to engage in social action. It brings together knowledge and research from pragmatics and sociolinguistics to show participants what they need to know about pragmatics. It requires participants to think critically about student-instructor-administrator interactions and take an informed, nonjudgmental perspective.
What Will I Learn?
Participants will
- acquire an understanding of pragmatics, in particular, sociopragmatics, to inform their understanding and production of interactional discourse.
- identify strategies and skills for their professional work with students, colleagues, and community members.
- recognize the value of informed, ethnographic–like research in everyday contexts to improve their capacity to take a nonjudgmental perspective on interactional discourse.
Discussion Questions
- How can we avoid essentializing cultures and people from other cultures in everyday interactions?
- How can we avoid psychoanalyzing others as we seek to understand interactional talk?
- How can sociopragmatic glitches put a speaker in a disadvantageous position regarding institutional discourse?
- Do we need to distinguish between speakers who are still learners of, say, English as a second/foreign language, from those who are no longer students, but rather using English as a language of daily communication?
- How does an individual’s interactional patterns overlap with that person’s identity?
- How does an awareness of sociopragmatics help individuals deal with situations where gender and power differences are salient?
- What are some applications to classroom and school contexts of a knowledge of sociopragmatics?
- How can we become everyday ethnographers in our interactions with others?
- How can teachers accomplish meaningful practice when teaching pragmatics in language classes?
- What do teachers need to do to go beyond individual speech acts or functions to help learners understand and develop their pragmatic competence in classrooms?
About the Presenter
Virginia LoCastro is currently an assessment specialist at ETS in Princeton, New Jersey, USA, specializing in test forms related to teacher education and licensure. She has more than 30 years of experience in the field of language education in various capacities as a language teacher, teacher trainer, author of textbooks and academic books and articles, presenter, graduate student mentor, and program administrator. She has worked in the United States, Canada, Japan, Slovakia, and Mexico. She has a doctorate from
Lancaster University and has carried out research in sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and issues in language education.
Virginia has written two books on pragmatics,
Pragmatics for Language Educators: A Sociolinguistic Perspective, and
An Introduction to Pragmatics: Social Action for Language Teachers, and contributed “Misunderstandings: Pragmatic Glitches and Misfires” to the TESOL Press publication
Pragmatics From Research to Practice: Teaching Speech Acts, edited by D.
Tatsuki & N. Houck.