CONFERENCE+REFLECTION+1-+HASAN+ACAR-

The conference that I want to write about is a conference from I “ATEFL 2012 GLASGOW”. The topic is “ELT & PRAGMATICS: WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW” and the presenter is Esra ÖZDEMİR. The presenter explains why, what and how we should teach pragmatics in our second language classes. According to the presenter the main aim of teaching pragmatics is to help learners to understand the correct use of the second language in different situations. I agree with her because it is not very easy for second language learners to realize the different use of language with different people and in different situations. Since the hours that learners are exposed to the second language are restricted and the learners are always in a classroom with the same people, it is important to teach them pragmatics by creating various situations in classroom environment. Moreover, she says that in daily life pragmatic errors may cause communication breakdown and pragmatics is teachable. After explaining why it is important to teach pragmatics during teaching a foreign language, she goes on with what to teach. She makes a list of pragmalinguistics aspects and sociopragmatic aspects. These aspects are all about to help the learners to communicate more fluently and to use the language socially appropriate. Then she talks about how to teach pragmatics. In this session, the presenter gives some charts about how to teach and develop pragmatics skills. There are form-focused instruction and strategy instruction. I think that these charts are not very clear. It is a bit difficult to catch what are the main differences between these two strategies and how we can use them efefctively. In my opinion she should have given some more examples about these strategies just to make them clearer. After these strategies, there is a framework about developing pragmatic competencies. It is a useful framework since it shows how teachers can help to learners to advance their pramatics skills step by step. There are six main steps which are researching, reflecting, receiving, reasoning, rehearsing, revising. It is explained what learners are expected to do in every step. After this informative part, there is a practical part in the presentation. The presenter shows some in-class activities for teaching pragmatic. The main topic that she focuses on is how to invite, how to refuse and how to accept. There are some example dialogues and some questions for the learners to help them to discover how the language is used. The learners should analyse and find the differences between the formal and informal language use about the same topic. This part is pretty good for teachers. It is useful because it gives an idea to teacher how they can teach pragmatics with activities and how they can eleborate these activities. At the end of the activities there are examples of two type of evaluation: one for peer evaluation and one for teacher evaluation. I found this conference very helpful, useful and informative. I agree with her that pragmatics is important in the process of teaching and laerning a new language and it is necessary to teach it. In order to teach it, we need some strategies and in-class activities. She explains them very well. Altough as I said before there sould have been more information about strategies, I liked the way how she organized the prsentation. Also there is a handout about the presentation which gives more details about the relationship between pragmatics and ELT, pragmatic phenomena and some definitions. This handout is another good source to have more idea about pragmatics.