HENB01151U English - Elective subject 4, topic 1: Cross-cultural pragmatics and foreign language teaching

This course explores cross-cultural norms for communicative behaviour from a foreign language learning and teaching perspective. We will explore the rules governing how to engage in conversation and how to express different speech acts in a polite and appropriate manner. All these conventions of communication differ across cultures and social groups, and acquiring pragmatic competence to deal with communicative needs is a difficult and often frustrating task for the foreign language learner. We will look at research on cross-cultural communication across different language groups and discuss developmental studies of pragmatic competence and the transferability of pragmatic skills across languages with a specific focus on issues related to language teaching. A number of theoretical and pedagogical questions related to teaching cross-cultural norms and different proposal for a classroom methodology will be discussed. The course will be conducted in English, using a mixture of lectures, group work and discussion. Course material will be based on Ishihara, N. and Cohen, A.D. (2010) Teaching and Learning Pragmatics. Where Language and Culture Meet. Longman Applied Linguistics and a number of empirical research articles.

Why choose a topic on language teaching as one of your electives? It is of course an obvious choice if eventually you want to teach English as a foreign language. However, knowledge of how native and non-native speakers manage cross-cultural communication and of the difficulties learners experience is also useful for the language consultant. In addition, the course might inspire you to carry out a small scale empirical study for your BA-project, and it will serve as preparation for specialising in foreign language acquisition at the MA-level