report

The presentation delivered a student was about pragmatics and grammatical

awareness. The presenter was first asked to explain the ideas and objectives
behind his presentation because it was noticed the last segment of the title was
a little bit unclear. The presenter defended his title saying that it relates to the
question of whether or not the pragmatic and grammatical competencies
develop hand in hand or there is a sort of disparity. He added also the idea that
the learning environment has an impact on the development of both
competencies. The environments that he meant are the native speakers and
non-native speaker’s contexts. The starting point of the presentation was a
remark on the second question shown in the first slide which indicated that the
context we are dealing with is English as a Second Language context.
Conversely, the context we need to deal with is English as a Foreigner
Language. In the introduction, a question concerning the meaning of pragmatic
and grammatical competence was raised, and diverse answers were given to
the question, for instance, grammatical competence means the ability to
produce a principled language respecting its grammar and structure, while
pragmatic competence is about appropriate language use in social and cultural
contexts. One major claim we agreed upon regarding the previous idea is that
both grammatical and pragmatic competencies are important as each one is
depending on the other. That is to say, we need pragmatics to behave
appropriately with people, and we need grammar in order to respect the
maxims. Similarly, communicative competence tends to include both
grammatical and pragmatic competencies as was claimed by the presenter. It
describes both users’ knowledge of language components and language use.
Later on, the presenter listed different types of competencies namely
grammatical, pragmatic, sociolinguistic, discourse and strategic competencies.
The aim behind presenting those competencies was to make us aware that
communication is not about mere use of words, but rather appropriate
language use especially when the language users are equipped with the
previous competencies which allow them to fit within various situations where
appropriate language use is required. We studied how there is a relationship
between the development of pragmatic competence in different settings. The
presentation depicted some investigations concerning this matter. Some
takeaways gleaned from the investigations presented during the presentations
can be concluded in following statement: language users tend to develop
pragmatic competence more the grammatical competence when they interact
with native speakers. They can deliver a pragmatically appropriate message,
but still lacking appropriate language use in terms of grammar. The presenter
reached the part where he discussed pragmatic transfer in the Moroccan
context. He gave examples in this regard, the professor brought into our
attention the idea that we should not decontextualize the sentence from its
context which means that we need, first, to know who is talking with whom, for
what reason, when and why; and by knowing these elements, we can judge or
assume the appropriateness of the sentence. In this respect, the teacher must
sensitize learners about the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts.
In the conclusion, the presenter restated the main idea of the presentation
which is that grammatical and pragmatic competence are both needed in
addition to other competencies to behave appropriately in different contexts.
One major remark was given to the presentation is that it did not take into
account our context which is English as a foreign language; it would have been
a very pertinent presentation, if he had considered EFL context.