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English Lingua Journal: Issues in English Studies
English Lingua Journal: Issues in English Studies
Neddar
Pragmatics in ELF
Abstract
The use of English as the global lingua franca highlights the need for an
understanding of the pragmatic principles governing communicative practices to
successfully communicate across diverse cultures. ELF users are necessarily engaged
in multilingual and multicultural practices. They thus have an ideal opportunity to use
English in order to negotiate multiple ‘hybrid’ interactions, rather than interactions
based on traditional, shared native speaker norms. This paper argues that although the
overriding importance of pragmatics as norms of use has been recognized in second
language communication, it needs re-consideration in the light of the more fluid
communicative practices of English when used as a global currency in international
encounters between people from different lingua-cultural backgrounds. Key
pragmatic features that characterise ELF interactions are discussed and some of the
pragmatic ELF users need to acquire in order to engage successfully in such
interactions are described and exemplified.
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English Lingua Journal, Volume 1(1) June 2015
© DSPM Research Lab, Mostaganem University Press
From the Appropriate to the strategic B.A. Neddar
Pragmatics in ELF
1. INTRODUCTION
The fact that ELF users will often be from different lingua-cultural backgrounds
means that they do not constitute a conventional speech community, as conceived in
the sociolinguistics literature (Brutt-Griffler, 2002). They are seen, however, as a
community of practice where English is used as effectively and efficiently as their
proficiency allows, to achieve communication and to avoid misunderstanding
(Mauranen, 2012). English in this context is viewed as “a special form of language
use operating under different conditions than both native/native and native/non-native
interactions” (House, 2009, p.141). ELF users have, outside their own operating
communities of practice, no shared cultural values that could possibly help to
establish common pragmatic ground for appropriate language use. Additionally,
teaching a wide variety of English speaking cultures and pragmatic rules would
require an immense cultural background that no teacher can possibly acquire. All of
this renders the notion of ‘appropriate language use’ problematic and thus
pedagogically challenging. The argument may run, therefore, for not attempting to
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English Lingua Journal, Volume 1(1) June 2015
© DSPM Research Lab, Mostaganem University Press
From the Appropriate to the strategic B.A. Neddar
Pragmatics in ELF
teach it in any traditional way. There is, in fact, nothing new in this. Widdowson
(2003, p. 57) calls for the dissociation of English from its sociocultural contexts of use
when restricted to institutional domains in international settings.
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English Lingua Journal, Volume 1(1) June 2015
© DSPM Research Lab, Mostaganem University Press
From the Appropriate to the strategic B.A. Neddar
Pragmatics in ELF
Exchanges in ELF are usually short, yet functionally very effective. Once an
agreement is reached and meaning understood, interactions stop. The following
extract from a recorded interaction between two of my students, just after leaving the
exam room ,(one Algerian, S1 and the other from the Republic of Mali, S2) illustrates
the point:
S1: yeah … we are all … nous avons tous le même problème (everybody laughing)
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English Lingua Journal, Volume 1(1) June 2015
© DSPM Research Lab, Mostaganem University Press
From the Appropriate to the strategic B.A. Neddar
Pragmatics in ELF
What is evident from the extract above is that the priority is given to making
pragmatic sense of the interlocutors’ utterances rather than the form of those
utterances. This accounts for the fact that no interactant tries to elaborate
unnecessarily or give to their interlocutor the possibility of doing so. As soon as one
guesses the intended meaning, he takes the floor, even if this means interrupting the
second party, thus downplaying the need for elaboration.
Another feature highlighted in the above extract is that interactions in ELF are
very collaborative. The two participants show a great deal of solidarity involving
adherence to what I will call the ‘assist principle’; that is displaying cooperative and
supportive behaviour. The fact that both speakers used the language of the other
party- ‘kif, kif’ in Arabic, meaning ‘the same’ by the Malian student, and ‘nous avons
tous le meme problème’ in French by the Algerian speaker- demonstrates this
solidarity (see Jenkins, Cogo & Dewey, 2011).
A look at the above- mentioned features reveals that they are all
accommodating and supportive strategies adopted to achieve interactional as well as
transactional goals,
I said earlier that what the shift from a product to a process methodology
harbours is our interest to focus on ways of enabling our learners to develop a self-
directed strategic behaviour that would make them more competent users of English
as a lingua franca. Once we know the particularities of ELF interactions, the question
then naturally arises, as to which pedagogy is appropriate for the teaching of
pragmatics so that breakdowns in ELF interactions are minimised. If language
competence and acquisition are thus redefined—from grammar to practice, cognition
to social context—we can expect that our pedagogical practices will also change.
Competence in ELF requires of its users both the capacity to understand other
varieties and the intelligibility in one’s own speech. This flexibility cannot be
achieved unless several pragmatic skills /strategies are developed and employed. The
following list, though not exhaustive, might provide a starting point for any syllabus
designed for the teaching of pragmatics in ELF environments. Some of these
skills/strategies can be classified under the heading of what Murray (2012) refers to as
“empirically based strategies” (p. 321):
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English Lingua Journal, Volume 1(1) June 2015
© DSPM Research Lab, Mostaganem University Press
From the Appropriate to the strategic B.A. Neddar
Pragmatics in ELF
I can divide the type of activities that may enable us to achieve these objectives into
three main categories:
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English Lingua Journal, Volume 1(1) June 2015
© DSPM Research Lab, Mostaganem University Press
From the Appropriate to the strategic B.A. Neddar
Pragmatics in ELF
The next stage involves presenting and commenting upon the reasons, which
led the students to assign different particular forces in each setting. The teacher may
follow this step by asking his/her students to work in pairs and write brief
conversational exchanges, identifying the different illocutionary forces that their
utterance may have.
Finally, the students can be asked to reflect on the reasons for their decisions. This
will raise their awareness of how their choices were affected by the context of
utterance including the status, age, and gender of the participants. The teacher may
also take the opportunity to bring to learners’ attention the fact that there is not
necessarily a one to one relationship between form and function. The three types of
mood in English: declaratives, imperatives and interrogatives, though commonly
associated with particular functions, are flexible and can be used to serve many
discourse functions. Examples, accompanied by the following question, can be used
to support this point:
2. Activities that help learners know how speakers mean more than their
words say: Teachers have to make students aware that utterances can and do
convey meaning beyond that contained in the surface form of the words
spoken and that context is important to identifying meaning. Multiple Choice
Discourse Tasks (MCDTs) where learners are given a series of short
dialogues, followed by a range of possible answers to the question ‘What does
speaker A/B mean?’ are appropriate in that they can be used with learners
from different linguacultural backgrounds. However, it is crucial that the
MCDTs should not be fashioned on the native speaker model, but rather
reflect ELF interactions. The authenticity of the situations in the MCDTs lies
in the very fact that they are drawn from various ELF situational encounters.
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English Lingua Journal, Volume 1(1) June 2015
© DSPM Research Lab, Mostaganem University Press
From the Appropriate to the strategic B.A. Neddar
Pragmatics in ELF
The teacher may use the short dialogues of MCDTs to bring up other issues
related to the features of ELF talks:
Once learners consider these questions and discuss the possible features
highlighted, they may be aware of the salient communicative strategies that
distinguish ELF from other varieties of English. The teacher may focus, at this stage,
on those features of greatest potential relevance to his/her students and discuss them
in ways that make their significance evident by having them comment on each feature
and provide exchanges that see these strategies at work.
Learners are asked to identify the degree of directness of each utterance and
explain the reasons that dictate the choice of one strategy at the expense of the other.
In this case, answers – some of which were suggested by Murray (2012, p. 297)-
might be along the following lines:
The second type of task in this category focuses on ways of giving options to the
interlocutor. Though negative face is something that people understand intuitively,
learners should be made aware that imposition is to be avoided in interactions. They
should rather leave free room for manoeuvre to their interlocutors. They have to know
how to yield to the power of the listener by leaving the power of decision to him/her.
One way of doing this is to ask them to comment on several instances of language use
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English Lingua Journal, Volume 1(1) June 2015
© DSPM Research Lab, Mostaganem University Press
From the Appropriate to the strategic B.A. Neddar
Pragmatics in ELF
where options are given and not given to the interlocutor, and to reflect on them.
Questions like the following can be included under this heading:
Activities of types 1 and 2 have to do with speech acts and aim at developing learners’
pragmalinguistic competence. Those of type 3 deal with politeness principles and how
we can help learners avoid any potential source of misunderstanding and
inappropriate communicative behaviour.
6. CONCLUSION
The emergence of ELF, with its call for a paradigm shift, has provided a new and, in
some ways, challenging perspective on the teaching of English. In part, this has been
driven by a realisation of the practical relevance of a view of English that recognises
the heterogeneous nature of ELF users and their interactions. Indeed, the sociocultural
and linguistic multiplicity of these users urges us to consider novel ways of
developing one of the most important aspects of language proficiency: pragmatic
competence. This should be promoted outside the confines of the NS norms of use
through activities that provide learners with the ability to develop pragmatic strategies
of the kind I have advocated in this paper with a view to facilitating a convergence of
meaning in interactions. What matters most is not the form through which meaning is
conveyed, but the ability as a speaker to make the functional intentions of the
utterance clear to your interlocutor and their recognition as such by the latter in the
absence of a sense of obligation to conform to a native-speaker norm. Correctness and
appropriateness are, in fact, of peripheral importance compared to performance – that
is, achieving meaning and communicative purpose. As Seidlhofer (2011) states,
students “do not need to learn words but, to borrow the title of Austin 1962, ‘how to
do things with words’” (p.196).
The use of English in a wide range of institutional settings and domains within
the global context necessarily transcends and undermines allegiance to any national
culture. If English then is taught to fulfill this objective, we need to fashion a
methodology and conform to principles that best serve this objective. This
methodology has to start far away from the native speaker and Inner-Circle centered
practices that stick to prescriptive forms of usage and norms of use that have always
accompanied the instruction of English in second/foreign language contexts and
which have demotivated, so many times, our students (see Ranta, 2013, p.42). Taught
within this framework, what I will dub ‘strategic pragmatics’ has the potential to fix
learners’ navigational problems when in the realm of meaning negotiation, and enable
them to use English with more confidence and success.
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English Lingua Journal, Volume 1(1) June 2015
© DSPM Research Lab, Mostaganem University Press
From the Appropriate to the strategic B.A. Neddar
Pragmatics in ELF
REFERENCES
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English Lingua Journal, Volume 1(1) June 2015
© DSPM Research Lab, Mostaganem University Press