Anchoring L2 pragmatics (language use and context) with touch and prosody

New article just published with Burri and Baker, Proposing a haptic approach to facilitating L2 learners’ pragmatic competence. This piece is relatively practical, focusing on use of haptic pronunciation teaching pedagogy for enhancing instruction and memory recall of the stuff of pragmatics: conversational conventions, politeness, indirectness, presupposition, implicature, irony . . . . humor!

It is based on three  . . . well . . . presuppositions. First, is that it is often really difficult to remember meaning and words that occur in only very narrowly defined situations. Second, one of the key functions of pronunciation is helping to anchor expressions and their contexts in memory.  Third, touch-moderated gesture (as in haptic pronunciation teaching) is a better way to do that.

 This is also a pretty good introduction to haptic pronunciation teaching. Of course, if you want more (and you will!), join us in our next webinars July 12th and 13th!  For reservations for the webinar: info@actonhaptic.com 

Prosody practice, pragmatics and attending skills training

At the upcoming, Annual BCTEAL conference in Vancouver next month, Angelina VanDyke and I will be doing a new workshop, one based on an excellent presentation that she did last year, entitled: Pragmatic Attending Skills Training for Oral Skills Classes

Here's the program summary: 

Clip art: Clker.com

"Being able to better facilitate development of pragmatic competencies with ELLs is a priority of most programs.  This workshop gives participants experience in combining attending skills training with prosodic pronunciation teaching techniques to enhance use of conversational strategies and responses appropriate to a variety of socio-cultural contexts."

And this excerpt from the proposal:

"This workshop uses a combination of attending skills training (Ivey, 1965; Acton & Cope, 1999) and select procedures derived from prosodic pronunciation teaching to create a framework that facilitates systematic attention to pragmatic strategies and appropriateness, with learners of a wide range of general communicative competence. [It] begins with a general overview of the use of pragmatics applied to conversational interaction teaching, followed by training modules in attending and haptic pronunciation teaching techniques."

The key to the integration of prosody and pragmatics in this case, as we have seen in research in haptics in general, is systematic use of movement and touch to "embody" prosody and expressiveness. Instruction and "uptake" of the pragmatic dimension of the interchanges take place in short dyadic conversations that provides context and opportunity for on-the-spot informal conversational analysis and anchoring of key expressions and speaker intention.

(Pragmatically speaking!), even if you are new to haptic pronunciation teaching, this one should be more than worth attending! (Check out this previous post on an attending skills workshop done at BCTEAL in 2012.)