Department of Languages and Applied Linguistics Presents

Professor Emeritus Andrew Cohen
Enhancing the Role of Pragmatics in Teacher Education

Wednesday, February 8
210 Humanities Bldg 1
5:15PM

Light refreshments will be served

The talk starts with the premise that for many target-language (TL) learners, the actual learning process consists of the rote memorization of lots of vocabulary and grammar rules, sometimes or even often without the knowledge of how to make appropriate use of this information in actual communicative situations. The talk will highlight certain specific areas in TL pragmatics that are teachable but often neglected in TL instruction, as well as some of the challenges involved in teaching this information. The talk will also include brief comment regarding the assessment of the pragmatics that is taught and strategies for students in the learning and performance of pragmatics. The speaker has been studying his 12th TL (Mandarin) for the last five years, so he can speak from experience about pragmatic failures.