Role-play as a bridging and integrating practice in language teaching and development of pragmatic competence in learners is well-established. In an EAP classroom (Van Dyke & Acton, 2021) explored the impact of one fluency protocol, Cooperative Attending Skills Training, by which students were trained to listen attentively to shared personal stories, working toward more sophisticated strategies of conversational interaction. That system included dialogic, pragmatics-focused, spontaneous analysis and instructor-student discussion of interactional discourse features. With that experience, further modeling and conceptual input, participants in this study engaged in six role-plays, each involving a problem requiring pragmatic accommodation. The data from transcribed role-plays were analyzed in terms of pragmatic discourse functions and NVivo-based thematic threads. The generally successful application of the targeted skills and concepts by course end most likely resulted from the engaging meta-pragmatic interactions preceding the role-plays, and the formal and informal instructor feedback related to implicature, prosody, implicit understandings, direct conversation strategies, grammar, and vocabulary.
This is a follow on to the previous piece, probably the second of three or four:
Van Dyke, A. & Acton, W. (2022). Spontaneous classroom engagement facilitating development of L2 pragmatic competence: A naturalistic study. Pedagogical Linguistics 3(1) 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1075/pl.20011.van
As reported in a previous blogpost, we'll be doing a pre-convention institute at the 2023 TESOL convention next March in Portland, based on our research. By then the next phase of the analysis, centering on prosodics and pragmatics should be in "presentable form." See you there!
