Event

SELHi Project: Enriching EFL through the teaching of pragmatics

Saturday, March 8th, 2008, 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM

Speaker: Jeremie Bouchard (Sapporo Sacred Heart School)

The presentation, a combination of lecture and group discussion, will focus on a SELHi (Super English Language High School) initiative involving two English courses: Comprehensive and Interactive. The Comprehensive course emphasizes a combination of sentence-based and discourse-based grammar teaching, and the Interactive course shifts towards the teaching of pragmatics. The presentation will also include a review of the Interactive English textbook created for high school second grade students, which was designed around the teaching of speech acts (language functions, e.g. compliments, apologies, requests, complaints, etc.). The main inspiration for this textbook came from an article written in The Language Teacher of May 2004 by John Fujimori and Noël Houck titled "Practical criteria for teaching speech acts". Along with Fujimori and Houck's emphasis on pragmatics as a necessary part of any language curriculum, the general argument of this presentation calls for a change in emphasis in the EFL classroom, from English as the sole object of study to English as a tool for effective communication.

Organization: Gifu Chapter of the Japan Association for Language Teaching (Gifu JALT)

Cost: JALT Members: free
Non-members: 1,000 yen

Venue: Heartful Square (southeast section of Gifu JR Station), Gifu City, Gifu-ken

Location: Gifu City, Gifu Prefecture, Japan

Contact Gifu JALT