Pragmatics through Literature: A Teaching Experience

Abstract

The article deals with a ten-hour teaching experience in “English Language 2” at Udine University in the second year of the Degree Course “Lingue e Letterature Straniere”. The main aim was to raise the students’ awareness of how conversation between literary characters can offer effective examples of what people can ‘do’ with language. The first part gives an overview of the basic literature in the history of pragmatics, touching upon key concepts, such as ‘speech act’, ‘cooperation’, ‘adjacency pair’, politeness and conversation management with ‘turn-taking’ and ‘floor-holding’. The second part gives an account of the workshops on the same topics. The intention is to provide some examples of a pedagogic approach to pragmatics through dialogues from literary texts. At the end an additional excerpt is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the module through the students’ autonomous analysis.

DOI: 10.4424/lam52016-5