Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

YATES AND WIGGLESWORTH 275Many recognized that awareness of these devices were particularly critical for learners asthey moved into the workforce and in social and other interactions outside of theclassroom:Essential for effective communication - especially in the workplace (3)Extremely, to give confidence, develop vocab, understanding Australia culture (66)Fairly important depending on situation and requirements (39)I think it’s important because students need to know these subtleties in language (16)The final question focused on evaluating their pedagogical knowledge and asked aboutthe extent to which they taught such material in their classrooms. Althoughapproximately half of the teachers indicated that they did consciously address pragmaticissues in the classroom, for many, this was incidental rather than planned:Yes - as they occur naturally e.g. Teacher expects apology for disruption/absence /failedcommitment or student inadvertently appears rude due to lack of awareness (22)Yes - varies on the level I’m teaching. Usually fairly minimal - modals/past tense formsin explicit teaching but focus on cultural ‘polite’ forums and customs throughout course(59)Yes. Sporadically throughout the course(s) (3)What was apparent was that teachers often felt they lacked the necessary resources toassist them in teaching this kind of material in the classroom:I’d love to see more classroom material available - this is actually a fairly complicatedarea (57)Not as much as I would like - there are few materials and time gets taken up with formrather than function at times. (83)The need to actually focus on it comes up, when specifically requested by the students orwhen I’m teaching [negotiating requests]as part of my program (78)We were pleased to find that there were quite a number of teachers who had alreadyincorporated the teaching of these devices into their normal classroom routine:I teach Eng[lish] to migrant health professionals - this is an integral part of theirspeaking course. We spend a lot of time working through appropriate ways of talking tothe public, peers etc. (18)I always spend a lot of time on ‘requesting’ behaviour in class and looking at formalinformalsituations but again have never analysed the language used (73)I have focussed on polite and impolite forms of request - important when completingwork experience in the workplace (53)Sometimes as a warmer. I use cards and students ask each other questions. Veryfrequently. Great to link up with the research (45)