Oral instruction is one of the most studied areas in classroom discourse research. It mostly focuses on the type of instruction (explicit, implicit, direct, or indirect), methodological aspects, learners' perception, and the impact on the learners. These aspects reveal themselves as salient within the instructional phase of a lesson. Pragmatic aspects of teacher instruction as part of classroom discourse, as well as the functions of teacher instruction in the initial phase of a lesson have a lack of proper attention. During the initial phase, the teacher and learners communicate each other about their agreement to conduct a lesson (Mehan, 1979). The current study focuses on the dynamics of pragmatic change in the teacher's instruction. The initial phase (~ 3 min. long) of two lessons of English reading comprehension in a Dutch public school (HAVO 5 and Atheneum 6) were coded for illocutionary acts and speech acts according to the Speech Act Theory of Austin (1962) and Searle (1965), pragmalinguistic strategies (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989), topic change and power bases (Reid & Kawash, 2017). We aimed to investigate the dynamic aspects of teacher instruction from the pragmatic perspective: discursive strategies the teacher used to redirect the learners' attention from the "phatic communication" (Schneider, 1987:247) to classroom activities. The results have revealed that pragmatic strategies are crucial for successful instruction. Different speech acts and pragmalinguistic strategies indicate the change in the illocutionary force of the teacher's instructional proposition, allow establishing and regulating social power, and redirecting learners' attention from phatic communication to classroom activities. The teacher may allow learners to chatter and use their conversations as a resource to switch language from heritage (NL) to foreign (ENG).
References.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., Kasper, G. (1989a). Investigating Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: An introductory overview. In S. Blum-Kulka, J. House, G. Kasper, (Eds.). (1989). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies (pp. 1 – 34). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Blum-Kulka, S., House, J., Kasper, G. (1989b). The CCSARP coding manual. In S. Blum-Kulka, J. House, G. Kasper, (Eds.). (1989). Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies (pp. 273 – 294). Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Reid, L., Kawash, J. (2017). Let's Talk About Power: How Teacher Use of Power Shapes Relationships and Learning. Papers on Postsecondary Learning and Teaching: Proceedings of the University of Calgary Conference on Learning and Teaching, 2, 34 – 41.
Schneider, K. P. (1987). Topic selection in phatic communication. Multilingua, 6(3), 247 – 256.
Searle, J. (1965). What is a speech act? In M. Black (Ed.) Philosophy in America (pp. 221 - 239). London: Allen and Unwin.
