Teaching and Learning Pragmatics: Where Language and Culture Meet

An understanding of sociocultural context is crucial in second language learning-yet developing this awareness often poses a real challenge to the typical language learner.

This book is a language teachers’ guide that focuses on how to teach socially and culturally preferred language for effective intercultural communication. Moving beyond a purely theoretical approach to pragmatics, the volume offers practical advice to teachers, with hands-on classroom tasks included in every chapter.

Readers will be able to:

- Understand the link between language use, linguacultural diversity, and multilingual identity

- Identify possible causes of learner errors and choices in intercultural communication

- Understand applied linguistics theories that support culturally sensitive classroom practices

- Develop a pragmatics-focused instructional component, classroom-based assessments, and curricula

- Help learners to become more strategic about their learning and performance of speech acts

- Incorporate technology into their approach to teaching pragmatics

This book aims to close the gap between what research in pragmatics has found and how language is generally taught today. It will be of interest to all language teachers, graduate students in language teaching and linguistics, teacher educators, and developers of materials for teaching language.

Noriko Ishihara is Associate Professor of English as a Foreign Language at Hosei University, Japan and leads language teachers’ professional development courses in the US and Japan. Her work has appeared in various journals and she is co-author of a Japanese language textbook with Magara Maeda, Advanced Japanese: Communication in Context (2010).

Andrew D. Cohen is Professor in Second Language Studies at the University of Minnesota. He has had many encounters with pragmatics, as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural development with Aymara Indians in Bolivia, a Fulbright Scholar in Brazil, and a professor in Israel for many years. He is co-editor with Ernesto Macaro of Language Learner Strategies (2007).