The Deployment of Drama in Teaching Pragmatic Concepts
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Date
2019-04-13
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Université Mouloud Mammeri Tizi-Ouzou
Abstract
This research addresses the usefulness of excerpts from William Shakespeare's the
Tempest, Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Harold Pinter's The Caretaker as
instructional materials while teaching pragmatic concepts. The concepts under study are; speech
acts, politeness and conversational management. The dialogues in the three plays are approached
in a similar way to the pragmatic approach to dialogues of everyday life. The analysis is conducted
for the aim of foregrounding how the concepts operate in context, how they reflect characters’
identities and relationships as well as how they manifest themselves linguistically. The results
yielded from such analysis help at testing the effectiveness of excerpts from the suggested plays as
means of discussing and illustrating the pragmatic concepts in class. The study reveals that the
three plays prove to be resourceful with varied social contexts that give rise to manifestations of
the target concepts. Additionally, they offer a variety of relationships, social contexts, and speech
that allow socio-pragmatic study of the language used. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The
Caretaker’s language is much closer to the language people use nowadays than the language in
The Tempest by Shakespeare. Moreover, they display more features of everyday talk than The
Tempest as well more complex, subverted and inappropriate patterns of interaction and strategies
of language use.
Description
152p.; 30cm; +(CD-Rom)
Keywords
Drama, Speech acts, Politeness, Conversational management, Teaching Pragmatics
Citation
Didactics of Literary Texts and Civilisation