Do you want to be TEFL or TESOL-certified and teach in JiAngyA Zhen? Are you interested in teaching English in Zhangjiajie Shi? Check out ITTT’s online and in-class courses, Become certified to Teach English as a Foreign Language and start teaching English ONLINE or abroad! ITTT offers a wide variety of Online TEFL Courses and a great number of opportunities for English Teachers and for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
As known Pragmatics is one of the ultimate branch of Linguistics. It deals with language in use and context in which it is used. Some of its features are: • physical context: where the conversation takes place, what objects are present, what action taking place • epistemic context: background knowledge shared by the speakers and hearers • linguistic context: utterances previous the utterance under consideration • social context: the social relationship and setting of the participants. Context is the surroundings that enable the participants in the communication process to interact. A good use of Business English, through the above features, can lead to more consistency in offices, international environments, trans-continental communication from own workplace . An accurate needs analysis (NsA) of the learning group (or individual) must always be administered. Contemporary companies -whether large corporates or just local activities- most of the time use English as working language, no matter which geo-localization. Globalization has made English a compulsory ingredient for international communication. Frequently companies rely on personal L2 knowledge of workers: it is, in general, variable with gaps every now and then; as one could imagine this would surely lead to miscommunications, mistakes, over-self-confidence from those who think that they can speak or write correct English just because they went live abroad in the past, and so on… In few words: confusion, lack of consistency, loss of reliability. Assumption: courses of BE should in first instance follow a pragmatic approach trying to help learners build in standards in their companies. English for Business is considered to be a part of ESP (English for Specific Purposes) of course it requires the development of fundamental skills LSRW – listening, speaking, reading, writing and specific vocabulary. After a brief introduction on the above skills in General English, the trainer can structure a course introducing the study of the language in relation to its users for their own purposes in (one of the definitions of pragmatics that best can serve the scope). Taking in account the features at the beginning of the essay, teacher can structure modules following the ESL style, whit phases of Engage, Study and Activate. Students can bring examples of how they currently work using English language in the workplace. Teachers can write on the board the four feature context and ask the students to sort out their currently standards (if present) according the specific situation they live. After that, build new standards with accurate vocabulary, analyzing deeper aspects of a daily use of English. Example: -Who are the addressers/addressee of your communication? -Which is the goal of utterance? -Illocutionary act, which is the particular situation in which you are speaking/writing? Before the end of the course make sure to give the tools that make the students build an own standard that is applicable to the entire crew working in the plant/company. A booklet with entries to fill would be a good idea. Some drawbacks: essentially in a BE course a teacher gives tools to students to improve their job, so a knowledge of GE is required to start the course. The BE course could not give a wide awareness of the entire English language with its idioms, slangs, accents, forms of pronunciation. There can be the risk that a skilled BE worker could not understands small chats when abroad, deviance from standards or sort out grammatical errors, new vocabulary or make inferences in a text never read before. Nevertheless with an acceptable presence of GE skills all will come in balance. The pragmatics, in most of the cases, is something that is innate and intuitive; we constantly use it. Calling things with their names, a good sorting and awareness of the language can increase standards, reducing waste of time, build a peer self-confidence among workers of same company, and find a straight way in the over-communicating world.
