Pragmatic Awareness of EFL Teacher Trainees and Their Reflections on Pragmatic Practices

Year 2013, Volume: 2 Issue: 4, 176 - 190, 27.01.2014

Mehzudil Yıldız Ekin , Ebru Atak Damar

Abstract

Knowledge of pragmatics has been a crucial element of language teacher training programmes. Future teachers should be aware of the pragmatic constraints of the target language to teach it to the foreign language learners. In general, language teachers intensively focus on grammar during lessons as they may lack pragmatic awareness in the target language, or they have difficulty to put into practice the pragmatic knowledge they already possess. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate the pragmatic awareness of EFL teacher trainees and their use of and difficulties in practical pragmatic applications. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was given to 30 EFL teacher trainees to investigate their awareness of pragmatic knowledge. Also, teacher trainees wrote reflection papers about their strengths and weaknesses about pragmatics in their actual teaching process and planned and practised a specific pragmatics-focused lesson. 10 teacher trainees were interviewed to get in-depth information about the problems they faced in teaching pragmatics. DCT results indicated teacher trainees have pragmatic awareness; however, the reflection papers and interviews revealed that their awareness was mostly on theoretical pragmatic knowledge. Lesson plans and reflective comments written following the lessons indicated EFL teacher trainees could not perform well in practical applications of their pragmatic knowledge. 

Keywords

EFL, instructional pragmatics, practicum, pragmatic awareness, teacher trainee

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