The
Pragmatics of Cooperation and Relevance for Teaching and Learning
Dr. Roger
Nunn
Petroleum Institute, UAE
Petroleum Institute, UAE
A. Introduction
Pragmatics is a
subfield of linguistic developed in the late 1970s. There are many definitions
about pragmatics as follows:
Ø According
to Liu that pragmatics studies how people comprehend and produce a
communicative act or speech in a concrete speech situation which is usually a
conversation.
Ø Yule
(1996:3) stated that pragmatics: The study of speaker meaning, the study of
contextual meaning, the study of how more gets communicated than is said, and
the study of the expression of relative distance.
Ø Thomas
(1995:1-2) stated that the most common definition of pragmatics was: meaning in
use or meaning in context.
Ø Levinson
(1983:5) stated that pragmatics is the study of language usage.
From all the definition it can be
concluded that pragmatics is concerned with speaker, interlocutor, meanings and
context.
Concerning with
pragmatics, according to Sperber and Wilson
(http://cogprints.org/2032/00/pragmatics-modularity-and-mindreading.htm) that
the central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines
speaker’s meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between
sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged. The hearer may have to
disambiguate and assign reference. The hearer’s task is to find the meaning the
speaker intended to convey, and the goal of pragmatic theory is to explain how
this is done.
Pragmaticians are
also keen on exploring why interlocutors can successfully converse with one
another in a conversation. A basic idea is that interlocutors obey certain
principles in their participation so as to sustain the conversation. (http://www.gxnu.edu.cn/Personal/szliu/definition.html)
Is the pragmatics applicable for Education especially in
teaching-learning? This question will be answered in this paper.
For long time ago, pragmatics such as Grice’s theory and Sperber and Wilson
B. The
title of journal
The
Pragmatics of Cooperation and Relevance for Teaching and Learning
C. The
researchers
Dr.
Roger Nunn
Petroleum Institute, UAE
Petroleum Institute, UAE
D. The
purpose of Research
This research intends to as
follows:
Ø Directly
address how The Pragmatics of Cooperation and Relevance for Teaching and
Learning are applicable.
Ø Name but
a few obvious applications that could have wide-reaching consequences,
teachers' language use when giving instruction or their contributions to
classroom interaction.
E. Discussion
In this research,
Dr. Roger Nunn tries to directly address how
The Pragmatics of Cooperation and Relevance for Teaching and Learning are
applicable and to name but a few obvious applications that could have
wide-reaching consequences, teachers' language use when giving instruction or
their contributions to classroom interaction.
Yet, before stepping
so far to the issue which will be discussed, it would be better to define
clearly what Cooperative Principles and Relevance Theory.
þ Cooperative
Principles
For Hendry Paul
Grice (1975), who was born in 1913, formerly a fellow of St. John’s College,
Oxford, and later Professor of Philosophy in the University of California at
Berkeley, there must be a conversation logic guiding the conversers, or
conversation participants must all abide by certain principles, although such
principles are clearly covert or not written out but must have been mutually
felt and respected. (http://www.gxnu.edu.cn/Personal/szliu/definition.html)
He added that there
are four maxims in the cooperative principles that all conversers seem
to obey; they are the maxim of quality, the maxim of quantity, the maxim of
relevance, and the maxim of manner. Such as follows:
Conversational Maxims (Grice
1975, p. 45)
|
Quantity
|
Make your contribution as informative as is
required (for the current purposes of the exchange). Do not make your contribution
more informative than is required.
|
|
Quality
|
Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not
say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
|
|
Relation
|
Be relevant
|
|
Manner
|
Be perspicuous.
Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief. (Avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly. |
So to make
conversation meaningful and successful, it requires four maxims mentioned
above.
Meanwhile Yule
(1996:1280 stated that Cooperative Principle is a basic assumption in
conversation that each participant will attempt to contribute appropriately, at
the required time, to the current exchange of talk.
þ Relevance
Theory
Dan Sperber and
Deirdre Wilson are respectively from the Polytechnic University of Paris and
University College London (UCL). In a joint effort to provide insight into
communication, they hypothesized that in comparison with the notions of
cooperation and politeness, the notion relevance is perhaps more salient
and pervasive, consistent and constant. Hence they proposed to account
for human conversation using their Relevance Theory. They observed that in
human cognitive endeavors, Relevance is the key word.
According to
Sperber-Wilson, Relevance on the part of individuals are manifest in two ways:
1. A piece
of information is relevant to an individual to the extent that its cognitive
effects in the individual are large.
2.
A piece of information is relevant to an
individual to the extent that effort required to achieve these effects is
small. (http://cogprints.org/2032/00/pragmatics-modularity-and-mindreading.htm)
Thus, Conversation must be
relevant to avoid misunderstanding and misinterpreting.
After having defined
what Cooperative Principles and Relevance Theory are, then I
will try to analyze whether they are applicable in teaching-learning.
For over a ten
year period, people considered that Grice’s theory of cooperation and
Sperber-Wilson’s theory of relevance not essential for language teachers. It
did not give any more contribution in education.
Dr. Roger Nunn,
who teaches language for over through years, finds it in contrast. He believes
that pragmatics including Grice’s theory of cooperation is essential for the
teachers to understand both what they are teaching and what is happening in
their classroom. For him it is difficult to say that pragmatics is irrelevant
to teaching and learning as it is concerned with people (students), language
(syntax/structure) and language use. For language teachers, however, they are
of relevant not only for insight into process of teaching-learning through
communication, but also for a consideration of what is being taught.
In this respect,
Dr. Nunn conducts two approaches both what is taught in language lesson and how
language taught trough classroom communication. He said that pragmatics is
applicable to language teaching, since classroom language teaching is an
occupation with essentially uses language in social context to promote learning
and teaching of language for use in social context. Pragmatics is a central
competence to teach students who will use language outside the classroom and to
teach teachers who will mediate its use for learning inside the classroom.
The new paradigm in language teaching has come like Hyme’s theory of
communication. He stated that it always had two applications to language
teaching.
…the
role of language as a device for categorizing experience and its role as an
instrument of communication canot be separated, and indeed, the latter includes
the former ( Hyme, 1974:19 in Alwasilah (2006:61) Pokonya Kualitatitif )
…it
is not linguistics, but ethnography, not language, but communication, which
must provide the frame of reference within which the place of in culture and
society is to be assessed( Hyme, 1974:19 in Alwasilah
(2006:61) Pokonya Kualitatitif )
This was influential, in theory at least, in changing the emphasis of
what we teach, from teaching language as a self-contained grammatical system
towards teaching language for use in social contexts.
Gabrielatos (2002, cited online), for example,
draws on Gricean maxims to propose general solutions to problems common to the
classroom. For learners who "may communicate unintended messages through
being over/under-explicit or using the wrong register, although they are
grammatically accurate" he suggests:
e Avoiding asking learners to be (over) explicit at
all times.
e Training learners in understanding the amount of
information the listener/ reader needs or expects.
In this case, White (2001) proved that teaching
Writing could be conducted based on Gricean maxims in the maxim of spoken
interaction. So it denotes that Pragmatics especially one of cooperative
principles is applicable in teaching learning in particular teaching writing.
Brown and Yule differentiated between transactional
and interactional language.(1983, pp 2-3) and become an interest in this discussion. Transactional language is
used to convey "factual or propositional information" and has the
primary purpose of "the efficient transference of information". They
use "primarily" to imply that there are multiple purposes in
communication. Interactional language, by contrast, is used "to establish
and maintain social relationships". As Brown and Yule point out, "It
is clearly the case that a great deal of everyday human interaction is
characterised by the primarily interpersonal rather than the primarily
transactional use of language."
The emphasis on "cooperation" clearly
signals the relevance of Gricean pragmatics to classroom learning.
The communication between students and teachers involves both
transactional and interpersonal language
Dr. Roger Nun took the sample of classroom
discourse recorded in secondary English class in the Middle
East the teacher uses more multiple elicitations, a very common
feature of his classroom contributions.
An analysis of this technique of multiple
elicitation can be considered in terms of Grice's maxims of quantity and manner
and it is all too easy for an outsider to conclude that there is too much
"teacher talk" and repetition and that the teacher could usefully
consider the maxim of manner "be brief”. At this "stage in the
discourse" the teacher is observably trying to obtain broader
participation
Grice's maxims are not rules to follow blindly, but
they do provide the reflective teacher with a useful means of critically
examining his or her own interactive behaviour. All teachers can benefit from
an external means of re-assessing something that is such an essential component
of their daily practice.
While "cooperation" will always be a
useful concept for educators. To ensure that classroom communication responds
to the requirements of relevance, teachers need to make assumptions about their
students' present state of knowledge. An important implication of relevance
theory is that the teacher needs to improve awareness about the students'
starting assumptions.
F. Conclusion
This paper has come to conclusion that “relevance”
and “cooperation” are applicable for teaching-learning by understanding and
operationalizing their key concepts. As Lowe (2004) points out, theory that
informs practice based on the philosophy of language provides a useful tool for
the reflective language teacher, and is currently an underexploited resource
This brief discussion has attempted to outline the relevance of pragmatic
theory to educational discourse, suggesting that it encourages educators to pay
greater attention to the educational process as an essentially cooperative
activity, "cooperation" in this sense being rigorously defined in terms
of transactional maxims and interactional principles.
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