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Volume 2, Issue 1 April 2019, pp. 39–58

Regular Articles

Teaching pragmatics: Nonnative-speaker teachers' knowledge, beliefs and reported practices

Christine Savvidou ¹, & Maria Economidou-Kogetsidis ²

¹ University of Nicosia, CYPRUS
² University of Nicosia, CYPRUS

DOI: https://doi.org/10.29140/ice.v2n1.124

Abstract

Teachers' backgrounds, knowledge, experiences and beliefs play a decisive role in what and how they teach, and research on teacher cognition indicates that teachers' knowledge plays an important part in guiding their classroom teaching (Basturkmen, 2012). At the same time, the inclusion of pragmatics in teacher development and training courses and the integration of language and culture in the foreign language learning curriculum have been seen as a necessity by a number of authors (e.g., Basturkmen & Nguyen, 2017; Byram, 2014; Ishihara, 2011, 2014). Yet, the knowledge and skills necessary to teach the L2 pragmatics and cultural awareness may not come automatically to all L2 teachers, and without adequate teacher education and/or sufficient exposure to the target L2 culture, it is not surprising that some language teachers feel uncomfortable about being a source for target language pragmatics (Cohen, 2016). Through the use of semi-structured interviews, this qualitative study aims to explore how Greek-speaking, non-native speaker teachers handle the teaching of target language pragmatics and culture, and, more specifically, to investigate their professional knowledge, beliefs, and reported practices in relation to the teaching of pragmatics and culture in their EFL classroom.

Copyright

© Christine Savvidou, Maria Economidou-Kogetsidis

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Suggested citation

Savvidou, C., & Economidou-Kogetsidis, M. (2019). Teaching pragmatics: Nonnative-speaker teachers' knowledge, beliefs and reported practices. Intercultural Communication Education, 2(1), 39–58. https://doi.org/10.29140/ice.v2n1.124

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