Practical Pragmatics: Teaching Speech Acts in EFL Classrooms

Speaker: Toshiyuki Suzuki

Date: Sunday, June 11th, 2006

Time: 2:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Location: Yokohama, Kanagawa

Venue: Ginou Bunka Kaikan (Skills & Culture Center) near JR Kannai and Yokohama Subway Isezakichojamachi map

Description: In this session, Toshiyuki Suzuki will talk about his attempt to develop learners' pragmatic competence by the teaching of speech act performance strategies. Participants will be first familiarised with basic concepts in pragmatics: pragmalinguistics, socio-pragmatics, speech acts, illocutionary force, politeness, semantic formulae, etc. Then the speaker will introduce what he has been up to in his classes: the instruction of speech act performance strategies in EFL (e.g. thanking, apologising, requesting, complaining) through an autonomous skit project. Video will be shown for participants to appreciate the learners' accomplishments there. There will be a workshop session where participants engage in the assessment of the learners' pragmatic competence in the speech act performance. The presenter will also introduce his recent discourse speech act corpus (DSAC) project, by which the large scale data on speech acts performance in English (of both native speakers' and learners') is to be accumulated and compiled.

Toshihiko Suzuki is a full-time instructor of EFL at Sophia University, Japan. He received B.A. from Waseda University (Japan), M.A. in ELT and Ph.D. in Linguistics from Lancaster University (UK). His research area includes pragmatics (linguistic politeness, speech act performance strategies, etc.) learner autonomy and other Linguistics and ELT related issues.

Cost for JALT members: free

Cost for JALT non-members: 1000 yen

Organization: Yokohama Chapter, Japan Association for Language Teaching

This URL: http://www.eltcalendar.com/events/details/2949

Contact Yokohama JALT Chapter:

URL: http://yojalt.org

Jonathon Campbell:

yojaltprogram@yojalt.org

Dan Ferreira:

yojaltpublicity@yojalt.org

Upcoming Events for Yokohama JALT Chapter:

Sunday, January 11th, 2009