September 2011\u2014Volume 15, Number 2<\/p>\n
Greetings,<\/p>\n
We are pleased to present this special issue, Incorporating Instructional Pragmatics into ESL\/EFL Teacher Education, edited by Zohreh Eslami. A special introduction to the issue follows below.<\/p>\n
We are sad to be saying goodbye to Maja Grgurovic, Co-editor of Media Reviews. She has been an extremely valuable member of the team; she’ll be hard to replace. If you would like to team up with Tom Delaney, currently editing our Media Reviews, please send your letter of intent and C.V. for review. Alas, none of our positions currently pays anything except our undying gratitude and a line on your C.V.<\/p>\n
A new copy-editor has joined the team, Russ Cummings, will begin work any minute on our December issue. Welcome Russ, and thanks in advance for your contributions.<\/p>\n
We will continue with this quarterly plea: we need more reviewers! If you are qualified to review manuscripts, please consider donating your time. Contact our Submissions Editor, Greta Vollmer, gretavo@gmail.com. Once you have reviewed a manuscript successfully, your name will be added to our Board of Reviewers.<\/p>\n
Finally, the former TESL-EJ site at UC Berkeley no longer exists. If you use the old site, or find links to the old site at berkeley.edu, please update!<\/p>\n
Enjoy the issue!<\/p>\n
Maggie Sokolik, Editor
\neditor@tesl-ej.org<\/p>\n
Thomas Robb, Co-Editor
\nco-editor@tesl-ej.org<\/p>\n
Greta Vollmer, Submissions Editor
\nsubmissions@tesl-ej.org<\/p>\n
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Zohreh R. Eslami The importance of raising pragmatic competence of language learners has increasingly been recognized in interlanguage and instructional pragmatics literature. To make pragmatic instruction a reality in the ESL\/EFL classroom, pragmatics should actually become a part of the language teacher\u2019s knowledge base.\u00a0 The papers in this issue address various issues related to teacher education in the area of L2 pragmatics. The authors present their efforts incorporating instructional pragmatics into their teacher development courses as well as their teacher learners\u2019 reactions to such endeavors.<\/p>\n All but one of the papers (Murray\u2019s) in this issue resulted from the studies presented at the colloquium on language teacher education and L2 pragmatics at the 18th<\/sup> Pragmatics and Language Learning Conference held in Kobe, Japan in 2010. The contributing authors in this volume present different models of professional development for promoting pragmatic instruction in different ESL and EFL settings. They share their achievements and some of the challenges they have faced in their efforts to promote instructional pragmatics in their teacher education programs in different contexts.<\/p>\n V\u00e1squez and Fioramonte conducted a study with a sample of students who had taken a course focused on pragmatics and language teaching in a Master\u2019s TESL program at one U.S. University. They surveyed the perceptions of the students who took the course during the past five years. Their aim was to find out whether the students who took the course were able to incorporate what they had learned in the course into their subsequent language teaching. The article reports on learning outcomes the students reported and the major obstacles facing teachers in bringing pragmatics into their language classrooms.<\/p>\n Eslami discusses a study that involved incorporating instructional pragmatics into an existing ESL Methodology course. The data for this study include graduate students\u2019 reflections and online discussions on what they learned in the course and from their experience teaching pragmatics to EFL learners in Taiwan through computer mediated communication. She used students\u2019 reflections, online discussion and the instructor\u2019s field notes as sources of her data and used thematic analysis to examine the data. The findings reveal how the incorporation of instructional pragmatics in an ESL Methodology course impacted the content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge of the graduate students who were involved in this telecommunication project and what challenges they faced as they taught pragmatics to EFL learners through the use of computer mediated communication.<\/p>\n Vellenga explores the value of continuing professional development on teaching pragmatics for teachers with a range of experience in a variety of contexts.\u00a0 Volunteer instructor participants in Midwestern and Southwestern U.S., Lithuania, and Japan were asked to teach a series of lessons on pragmatics to university-aged ESL learners in ESL and EFL contexts. Detailed lesson plans served as a mini-course on teaching pragmatics, incorporating an in-service professional development approach. Data included instructor responses to demographic questionnaires, comments on lesson checklists and responses to mid- and post-teaching interviews. Her findings support the premise that there is lack of emphasis on pragmatics in teacher education programs. Teachers showed interest and eagerness in teaching pragmatics and planned to incorporate pragmatics into future teaching contexts.<\/p>\n While the other studies included in this volume investigate the effects of instructional pragmatics on participating teacher learners in general, Ishihara\u2019s work is an in-depth ethnographic case study which focuses on how teacher cognition develops in classroom discourse. Her study explores the development of participant teachers\u2019 cognition during a professional development seminar on instructional pragmatics in Japan. The teachers\u2019 documents, recordings of the teacher development seminar and the instructor\u2019s filed notes were analyzed, focusing on the process of the teachers\u2019 interaction and development.\u00a0 \u00a0The study offers a unique approach to explore the effectiveness of teacher development in instructional pragmatics using a short professional development model and focusing on the process of teacher cognition development.<\/p>\n Murray\u2019s contribution in this volume brings another perspective to pragmatics and teacher education by focusing on the enhancement of the pragmatic competence of the teachers themselves.\u00a0 The study focuses on ways of developing the pragmatic competence of nonnative English speaking teachers to facilitate their work in Australian primary and secondary schools. The teachers were explicitly taught about implicatures based on the Gricean framework. \u00a0Murray used a discourse completion task (DCT) as a follow-up activity to assess the teachers\u2019 learning and provide them with an opportunity to reflect on linguistic and cultural factors underlying their responses to the original version of DCT.\u00a0 Learner responses and reflections were examined to investigate the applicability of the written discourse completion tasks in classroom teaching and the usefulness of the Gricean framework.\u00a0 The findings reveal that due to the intuitive nature of the Gricean maxims, the Gricean model of implicature is valuable for the education of teachers and effective for their intercultural learning.<\/p>\n I hope this Special Issue of TESL-EJ will be interesting to readers and conveys our message that study of pragmatics needs to continue to be systematically addressed in language teacher education. Today, with growing publications in this area, instructional pragmatics seems to be gaining a higher profile in the curriculum of second language teacher education. Needless to say that since teachers are the primary agents in advancing instructional pragmatics, they are entitled to be more informed about interlanguage and intercultural pragmatics and professionally prepared to teach and assess pragmatics, as well as to reflect on their own practices effectively. The current status of instructional pragmatics demands concerted efforts in further highlighting pragmatics-focused instruction, curriculum development, research, and teacher education, if pragmatics is to play a more prominent role in L2 instruction. We hope that the papers in this volume serve as an impetus to move this line of research forward.<\/p>\n I would like to express my gratitude to the journal editor, Maggie Sokolik, for providing me with this opportunity to guest edit this special issue. I would also like to offer my appreciation to all the authors for making a contribution to this issue. I believe that their effort fills an important gap in an underrepresented area of research (Pragmatics and Teacher Education). Finally my sincere thanks go to the reviewers of the articles who took time to read and provide valuable comments to the authors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" September 2011\u2014Volume 15, Number 2 Greetings, We are pleased to present this special issue, Incorporating Instructional Pragmatics into ESL\/EFL Teacher Education, edited by Zohreh Eslami. A special introduction to the issue follows below. We are sad to be saying goodbye to Maja Grgurovic, Co-editor of Media Reviews. 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\nTexas A&M University<\/strong><\/p>\n