Language Teaching Concepts

Overview

Language Teaching Concepts

Copyright © Edizioni La Creazione 2012
Published online 1 September 2012

Abstract

The aim of this study is to show that Pragmatics together with Semantics and Syntax is an essential  ingredient for the teaching of modern languages​​. Indeed, Pragmatics is the relationship between what is said in communication (that is, the concepts and meanings which are communicated by the speaker's choice of particular words and structures) and what is done in communication ( that is, the effects the speaker's utterance has on the hearer, such as to persuade, inform, amuse, etc.). This focuses on speaker-meaning and hearer-effects and encompasses the use of linguistic items for the coding of meaning, as a communicative system. It is a two-way system of interaction. It is speaker-based in that is concerned with meanings the speaker selects, the construction of propositions from concepts, and the speaker's attitudes towards these propositions. It is also hearer based in that the propositions have perlocutionary effects on hearers. It is hence essentially a theory of speech acts.

The concept of speech acts, which, following Austin (1962), is concerned with the acts that we perform through speaking, has been studied extensively in recent years, and has constituted a topical focus for scholars from a greater number of disciplines. Speech Act theory has been central to the work of researchers in conversational analysis, discourse analysis and semantics. Our focus is on how propositions are interpreted as different types of speech acts so we have to discuss this in terms of the assumption about the world, about communication, and about linguistic meaning which speakers and hearers share and which they appear to make use of in interpreting utterances and assigning them appropriate meanings.

The findings show that when we teach a modern language in the classroom we a) describe how to form sentences or clauses (syntax), b) consider any linguistic factor-operator in relation to propositional logic (semantics) and c) describe or analyze ways of speaking, when we must say something, how we must react as receivers to the messages of the sender (pragmatics).