 I'm a master's in applied linguistics and I'm currently completing my PhD in second language acquisition. It's great to see so many of you here today. It's really a pleasure to be here to talk to you about something that's very, very close to my heart and something that I'm sure we all have experience of dealing with in the classroom and even in our everyday lives as well. So, rude or oblivious language in context. Let's think about that for a moment. I'm sure as English language teachers we've all had moments in classrooms where we may have thought our students are being rude or in a polite and some way. I'm sure if we also reflect on our own language learning experiences, I'm sure we all have very amusing stories to tell about maybe using language in the right way, choosing the right words or the funny consequences that can happen of maybe choosing the wrong expression or maybe not understanding what someone's saying to us. Basically what happens in these situations is what I'm going to try and dissect today and with the idea being hopefully by increasing understanding and increasing awareness among the teaching community that that helps our understanding as teachers and that that will feed back into improving our students' understanding of what happens when they operate in a second language in another culture. So for me, the answer lies in the subject of pragmatics. Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics which deals with basically the idea of how you use language appropriately in context. That differs from culture to culture, country to country and even person to person. Pragmatics takes into account the social rules, the often tacit social rules, which govern how we use language in a socio-culturally appropriate way. Pragmatic competence is innate among first language speakers. Most first language speakers, there are exceptions but as a general rule, first language speakers know how to use language properly in the right context. The key to using the right language works along the scale of directness or politeness. The level of directness you choose in any language is connected to the level of politeness that you wish to convey or the level of politeness that is then perceived by the listener. What you may be trying to convey may not be what the listener understands. Obviously, perceptions vary culturally and they can vary drastically and without that knowledge of how those perceptions vary, the results can be absolutely catastrophic for communication in general, but even for our learners in their progress as they continue to move up along the sea and for a scale. So let me demonstrate. We have a look at two languages. We look at Hiberno English, which is our rich variety of English that we use here in Ireland and I'm going to compare that to Russian. The first thing to take into account is that English speakers and particularly Hiberno English speakers really value the sociological concept of face, saving face, whereas Russian speakers tend to place more value on frankness and directness. And the consequence of that is that Hiberno English speakers tend to be much more indirectly speak whereas Russians choose to use more direct strategies, the imperative for example. And these strategies then are perceived as how to be polite in the language. And because of that, Hiberno English speakers tend to use informal language regardless of the context they're operating in, whereas Russian speakers in their minds have a very clear distinction between formal language for formal contexts and informal language for informal contexts. Clearly they have this contextual distinction in their mind of when to use a certain type of language whereas Hiberno English speakers do not. This links into the idea of language identity, how identity is enacted by using language. And Hiberno English speakers tend to have a more conversational identity that they enact about what the context is. Whereas again, Russian speakers tend to have in that different identities and different contexts. So when you're at the boss at work, that's one identity that's being enacted through language. So when you're at home with your family, it's almost like you're a different person in terms of the language you use. And what comes from that then is the social values that seem to be embedded within the culture. So there's very, very high levels of social informality embedded in Hiberno English language because of Irish culture, whereas the idea of social distance is very, very strong in Russian culture. So what happens is, if you imagine a Russian speaker learning English and operating within a Hiberno English speaking environment, it's a complete mismatch, okay? Misunderstandings can very, very easily occur, misinterpretations occur and very easily we can... It's too easy to jump to the conclusion that this speaker is perhaps being rude in that environment and that's not really what's happening. What they're doing is they're transferring maybe the strategies or the cultural norms of their own language into their target language, into the second language. Let's have a look at a couple of these examples. This is basic language transfer, something we're all very, very familiar with. I have 21 years. Can anyone tell me where you think this student might be from? Thank you. Thank you for the friends. Yeah, probably why. What's happening here? It's a direct translation. It's a direct translation from using Afro in French. This one, I have House. A couple of guesses. Arabic? Polish? Close enough. What's happening? The article is missing, right? So just because I had to speak here about Russian speakers there, that's something typical. There are no articles in Russian. Therefore, that would be transferred. Another one here. There may or may not be a problem here. He's too sensible. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that's a bad thing. But what could be happening? Spanish. Spanish for sure. And the idea of what's happening? False friends. It's a false friend. Yeah, between sensible and sensitive. So we're all really, really aware of what's happening with direct language transfer. But there's also pragmatic transfer. Okay. So that speaker will transfer a strategy that they use in their own language to communicate, to achieve something. A really clear example of that is really clear when we look at requests. Requests are one of the most demanding speech acts in any language. But this is a particularly stark contrast. This is something typical that you may hear Polish or Russian speakers use. If they want you to open the window, they might just use the direct imperative open the window because that's what they would do in their own language. Using the imperative is not considered impolite. In fact, because you're being direct, it is considered to be the polite strategy to use. So this is one clear example of where the perception of, whoa, maybe ask me nicely. And another example there is just by using that performative structure. I apologize instead of basically, I'm sorry, for whatever it is. Another type of pragmatic transfer though is sociopragmatic transfer. And this is then the transferring the embedded cultural ideas or your own ideas about how the world operates, how you want to portray yourself within a language. So examples might include speaking to the teacher who you have ghost. Referring to the teacher as Mr. Sir, I don't know about you, but I would find that a little bit strange. I would prefer if a student just used my first name to refer to me. And another thing there would be just kind of maybe asking inappropriate questions, things we don't usually talk about, like how much do you earn, what's your pay for that, you know, what we would maybe even consider to be issues. For me then, if I think about the language learning process, it's kind of threefold. It starts with basic communicative competence. So A1 speakers, if they have a very limited range of vocabulary, they can still achieve what they want by pointing, pay. Yeah, they'll get what they want, the exchange takes place. It's very, very transactional. But then it kind of increases into more enhanced communicative competence when the vocabulary range extends, they become more aware of grammatical structures and using them correctly as in they may use the correct grammatical structure, like give me your pen, please. That's a big step up from just pen, but it still may not be quite there in terms of what we might... In terms of what we as native speakers might use to identify whether this second language speaker is actually a successful communicator and is actually someone we might want to spend time with, be friends with, fire or fire, basically. So that's why they need this step also. They need to kind of include pragmatic competence in that and that's being aware of the social norms which govern the language they're using and applying that to the basic communicative competence they have and the grammar. So it's threefold and it's a big step between each of them. That's kind of the whole idea that I want to get across today is that the role of the teacher in this process is paramount. You cannot expect someone to achieve that third step from just a book or without interacting in the language. In the classroom, you can guide them towards that third step but you also need to encourage them to use the language outside of the classroom to talk with their host families, to speak with people that they need to speak with native speakers so that they can basically draw their own conclusions about what's the right language to use. So this diagram is really important for students, for teachers to kind of be aware of. If we start at the top with pragmatic failure, so a learner has used the recursive, let's say, and has caused a fence. Unintentionally, completely unintentionally, they're oblivious. That can lead to a lot of confusion because they think, hey, I've got the structure right. What's happening here? Why didn't you open the window? Why are you upset? And then that leads back into kind of embarrassment and fear of maybe my pronunciation's not right, maybe I'm having a problem with the structures. They may hesitate to then use the language the next time they want to communicate. So it kind of hinders the progress because of lower confidence and because of the whole process, they're not progressing as quickly as they should be and they're still carrying out pragmatic failure. That's why the role of the teacher is so important to intervene somewhere here and to basically break it down for them and explain, okay, this is the language, but look at the context. Are you using the language appropriately? So I guess the big question is what can we do? As teachers, how can we help our students use language in a more sociocultural appropriate way? Well, the first thing is listen to them. Be patient and obviously don't judge. It's really, really, it's too easy almost to come to a snap decision about a student or a person based on the language that they're using and we do that every day. We do that every day in our own lives. But I suppose being understanding about the fact that they're operating in another culture in a completely different language, that's the most important thing to start with. Then illustrate, interact and induct. This has been put forward as an alternative to the PPP, to the presentation practice production that we all use every day. Basically, it involves using real-world examples. Okay, so it could be a video, it could be a conversation you've overheard and bringing that into the classroom, explaining the whole context of the situation to the students, getting the students to interact and kind of enter into discussion about what went wrong, let's analyze the language, let's analyze the situation and then induct, getting them to use it and encouraging them to use it, not just inside the classroom, but also out, of course. Eliciting examples from the students in their own lives, if you tell a story about yourself, well, when I was learning Russian, for example, I found it really, really difficult to use the imperative myself. It's not something I normally do, but then if you want to get something done, that's what you've got to do. So sharing ideas like that and getting the ideas from the students that will help them become more aware of what's actually happening and get them to compare their ideas on that as well. And by doing this, the students are interacting. They should be testing, then, their own hypotheses about the language, what works, what doesn't, when and with whom. This then leads to them, hopefully, noticing errors that they're making themselves and self-correcting. And this is basically more consolidated learning, improved understanding of not just the structure of a language, but the context in which we use it. And hopefully, this leads to pragmatic competence. So, I'm going to not tell. I feel like my picture. I particularly like it, because it looks like Pac-Man. For me, it's interesting to be studying the second language acquisition and working within an EFL environment because I feel there's so many good things happening in both worlds, but we're not kind of connecting the two. So what second language acquisition research tells us is that obviously language is more than just words. There's the human factor that we need to take into consideration. The social factor, the cultural factor, what affects the language choices we make. Cognition influences choices and with this, it's important also to note age. The cognitive development of a student will impact the language choices that they make also. So, the approach that you might take to perhaps teaching a teenager and teaching an adult about these things may be different. You may have to be perhaps a little bit more sensitive with older students, whereas younger students may understand a little bit more quicker here Social norms vary cross-culturally and obviously perceptions of the life of this fairy within cultures and certainly cross-culturally. And I think it was Deborah Tannen who said that the fate of the earth depends on cross-cultural communication and with English keeping it status as lingua franca I think it's never been more true. So with that then how the EFL world can react, how can we react as teachers to what we know is fact from second language acquisition research? Well, the first thing to make sure that our students understand is that English speakers value linguistic indirectness. Books are great, but they do have that limited potential of really teaching the context. No matter how much you trail it out or what role it plays you to or what activities you do, you're still the most important person in that classroom when it comes to developing pragmatic competence because you've operated in that environment for much longer than the student has. You're more aware of the rules that exist that govern how we choose the language we choose to use. And finally, if you take anything away from today just be understanding of the fact that it's a very difficult thing to do to learn a second language. We're all very, very aware of that. But instead of perhaps teaching explicitly, we should try to guide the student towards more appropriate language. And with that I will just give a very small caveat of just because we think one structure is polite does it mean that that's the right one to teach? Because it's important that we kind of strip back on the individual perception and try to think of it as a more general cultural thing. Culturally what is the right strategy to use for each situation. That is it. Thank you very much.