Teaching English Toolbox - OPEN ACCESS SANDBOX
Pragmatics and Sociolinguistic Competence
Even if you take a CLIL approach to your teaching, you should consider how your lessons focus on functional language and use of English for communicative purposes such as turn-taking and in various situations where you might have to be more or less polite. For example, your learners might
- give a presentation on a specific topic (say animals) and they have to introduce the topic ("welcome to my presentation!") and thank the audience ("Thank you for being such good listeners!");
- play a board game and need to tell one another to "Choose a card" or that it's "their turn";
- give a tour of their school to people from overseas whom they do not know and need to be polite;
- encounter tourists on a train asking for directions in English;
- give compliments to one another!
Thus, language teaching is much more than the four skills and grammar and vocabulary! Here is a collection of resources on the teaching of pragmatic competence from the English Teaching Forum: https://americanenglish.state.gov/resources/teaching-pragmatics
The Importance of Classroom Language
In this example, you clearly see two functional tools and speech bubbles with sentence frames in them to help learners ask for clarification. What will your classroom look like?
If you use google images to search for "classroom language posters", you will find many more ideas.
Ask yourself what language learners need to play a specific game and stick to English, to work together collaborating on a task and so on and then you will see that the language AROUND the activity is almost more important than the language WITHIN the activity!!!
- Talk about functional approaches in terms of: CLIL, games, classroom management, the CEFR, BICS/CALP, traditional ESL/EFL
- Think about a lesson: What language will you select to teach that transfers outside of your classroom context to another context?
- Can you name some functions of language and their exponents?
- Take time to search for "sociopragmatics", "pragmatics" and "sociolinguistics" - what interesting definitions and activities do you find that apply to your context? Where are grammar, vocabulary, reading, writing, listening and speaking in these contexts?