Teaching Case Study I: Practical Pragmatics

ARE YOU DOING SOMETHING UNUSUALLY PRACTICAL IN YOUR EVERYDAY LANGUAGE TEACHING? HAVE YOU COME ACROSS WITH METHODOLOGIES THAT YOU USE THAT YOU WANNA SHARE WITH OTHERS?

We can use this blog to share ideas, courses, classes… etc that we have created or helped to develop and share them with the wider community. I’ll start.

I decided to share with you an element of the language course that we have included this year in our Final Year BA Spanish. I am the coordinator of this element and the title of the element within the language course is ‘Practical Pragmatics’.

The two main goals of this element is to expose the student to ‘texts’ (videos, docummentaries, magazine snapshots) of the many native Spanish-speaking cultures which include items of colloquial language AND to give the students a methodology to analyze these texts grammatically (meaning and structure) and pragmatically (speech acts and their related grammatical functions; politeness and impoliteness; deixis; persuasion and power dynamics).

It’s a course deviced for students with a B2-C1 level of Spanish,obviously. In their majority all the students have been studying in Spain for a year or so. This course is challenging and the student feedback so far has been very good.

If you want more information about the specifics of each lesson or the audiovisual texts I use, you can email me at Pilar.alderete@nuigalway.ie. YOu can also email me there to share any useful ideas or original stuff you are doing in your everyday language teaching. OR LEARNING!

NOW IT’S YOUR TURN!