Pragmatics in Aeronautics: Teaching Directions and Procedures

Revista de Estudos da Linguagem, 2021

Abstract: The ICAO Language Proficiency Rating Scale offers parameters for aeronautical English teaching and assessment focused on oral skills. It assists governments worldwide in assessing pilots and air traffic controllers’ English proficiency, licensing them for international operations. This paper addresses two of the six linguistic areas listed in the Rating Scale, namely fluency and interaction, to understand what conversational elements are present in pilot-controller communications with a view to informing pedagogical material. The analysis is based on a corpus of pilot-controller radio communications in abnormal situations, revealing a more spontaneous code as opposed to the documented Standard Phraseology mandated for routine situations. Corpus Linguistics is the methodology chosen for this investigation, concentrated on the top frequent three-word clusters extracted from the corpus. Investigation of these clusters reveals that fluency and interaction are interconnected an...

Examining the mental and social processes involved in communication through language, Understanding Pragmatic is a comprehensive introduction to the subject. This book provides an overview of the theoretical basis of pragmatic examines the main theoretical perspectives and explores its methodological aspects. As for the pragmatic in its broadest sense, covering the whole range of social, cultural and cognitive construction of meaning through the use of language aspects. Assuming no background in the pragmatic, the text provides helpful summaries, chapter by chapter for suggestions of reading and research topics for further study. The book tries to address questions such as what do people do when language is used? How exactly the meaning is generated when we communicate? And why do we say when we say something else? This review gives an overall review of the book and seeks to cover the whole concepts that are mentioned; eventually the reviewers have given their comment and conclusion of the book.

Journal of Pragmatics, 2012

Virginia LoCastro's book Pragmatics for Language Educators is a contribution to the growing interest in teaching pragmatic aspects of second and foreign languages (e.g. Huth and Taleghani-Nikazm, 2006; Soler and Flor, 2008). The book's goal is ''to help both novices and experience researchers in the field of pragmatics to expand their awareness of the social aspects of language in use'' (p. xi) and it pursues what LoCastro calls an ''inclusive view of pragmatics'' (p. xi). This means not only that LoCastro sees both micro-and macro-contextual factors as vital for the creation and interpretation of meaning in interaction but also that she includes a number of fields focusing on the study of language, interaction and culture-e.g. conversation analysis (CA) and discourse analysis, among others-in the study of pragmatics. Pragmatics for Language Educators consists of thirteen chapters, grouped together into four parts. Part I gives, in three chapters, an overview over the field of pragmatics, with a particular emphasis on the 'territory' covered by the book. In Part II, each of the seven chapters focuses on a central area of pragmatics. Part III features two how-to chapters on research projects in sociopragmatics. The conclusion in Part IV discusses the relevance of pragmatics in a culturally diverse world.

2009

This volume presents a wide ranging overview of key theoretical and practical issues, empirical research and various analyses of pragmatic phenomena that will certainly be most useful and helpful to students and researchers in pragmatics and other linguistic disciplines and, of course, to L2 teachers. It is divided into five parts that include chapters addressing cognitive issues on L2 teaching, how and what to teach when dealing with specific speech acts, intercultural aspects of communication, the teaching of languages for academic and specific purposes and some other methodological issues on pragmatics teaching.

Acta Neophilologica, 2003

A good teacher of a language is one who reflects on the nature of the language they teach, who has certain views on its origins, structure, func tion and rules of use, in a similar fashion that a teacher of physics should have a deep knowledge of the subject that they teach. And, although some teachers are ignorant of, or even hostile to linguistics, it goes without saying that the subject matter of language teaching is language. Thus, there should be no doubt that the study of the subject matter should concern any profes sional language teacher, who should not just trouble themselves with me thods and techniques how to teach, but first of all-what to teach and why. Linguistics has always exerted powerful influence on the theories of language teaching. Early on, when linguistics emphasized paradigmatics and syntagmatics, when language needed to be organised, with language as a reified abstraction, structural syllabuses were the mainstream. Later, the influence of pragmatics came to be felt, resulting in the rise of functional and communicative approaches (for overview, see Harmer 2001). Nowadays, along with pragmatics, language teaching is influenced by socio-linguistics, ethnology, as well as cognitive linguistics. As a result, we examine language mainly as a means of communication between people, and in our research we very much concentrate on language in use, as an inter-personal instru ment for cross-cultural communication (Harmer 2001, Lewis 1993, 1997). Pragmatics entered the stage of language pedagogy when researchers from the field of applied linguistics whose main interest was language in use, either from a psychological, sociological or pedagogical perspective, felt that the lack of description of pragmatic knowledge with respect to compe tence and performance in Chomsky's model has to be somehow fulfilled. In this model, there is a sharp dichotomy between competence and performan ce, competence being the tacit knowledge of language structure, an abstract idealization, "the perfect knowledge of the ideal speaker-listener in a homo geneous speech community" (Chomsky 1965). It contrasts with performance, language in use, subject to all limitations which can befall performance, such

This analysis aims at analyzing the essence of pragmatics and its relation to the current communication practices. In order to achieve the attempt I try to gather some definitions so that I can create a more reliable working definition which leads to better understanding toward the existence of pragmatics. Further, some theoretical concepts relevant to pragmatic are also employed so that I can find the relevance of pragmatics with the other current communication and teaching practices. Based on the analysis toward the elements of pragmatics (implicature and speech act), the relevant theories related to pragmatics and language teaching as well as the current researches on pragmatics in language teaching I can conclude that basically pragmatic is strongly connected to culture in which humans generally adopt in order to lead their lives. Pragmatics which constitutes the important part of linguistics is also in need of more comprehensive research/analysis due to its interconnection with the other aspects such as: culture, context, situation, participant, gender, channel, topic, facial expressions, gestures, proximity, posture and echoing which are unfortunately still separately analyzed by other relevant disciplines such as; teaching, linguistics, etc. All of the above aspects (which I divide into two broad aspects) are found to be intermingled in the process of communication. Based on the research data gathered I also found that most of the pragmatic researches seem to center on more practical issues such as: the use of the book, the teaching of pragmatic aspect, sociolinguistic/cultural awareness rather than a deep analysis on the language itself which tends to create vague and contradictory arguments even among the scholars in this field. Due to its connection to cultural aspects, the process of transferring pragmatic aspects should be more naturally oriented instead of formal through classroom learning this is because classroom learning is not considered sufficient to provide a more natural practice just like in the outer world. Thus, while the concept of pragmatics and the analysis of pragmatic elements covered by the two experts are certainly always worth-pondering, nevertheless, its application in language learning/teaching should be wisely in support of the students’ understanding since the theory of pragmatics tends to be more analytical and conceptual rather than practical. It is certainly the challenge for the next researchers to find more benefits of pragmatics in such a more practically viable manner so that pragmatics will never belong to those elitists coming from the other side of the world such as: philosophy or linguistics, and can be of significance to assist humans in their endless quest to find a better communication mode for the sake of their continuous survivability. Keywords: revisiting, pragmatics, elements, relevance, communication practices.

2018

The central point of this article is that pragmatics is deeply rooted in people’s communication ability. Being able to interact and communicate with others in various situations becomes the pivotal goal in teaching English as a foreign language. Yet, little empirical evidence shows how to deploy pragmatics awareness, particularly, in vocational educational setting. To fill this gap, this special affinity requires the English teachers to explore the activities in speaking classroom in which these help students use appropriate expression and have accurate interpretation to result successful communication. There are three activities; listening to passages about complaining in other cultures, presenting L2 strategies for complaining and performing role play with discussion, which fleshed out procedural activities to trigger successful communication. The article contributes a deep insight of pragmatic competenc...

2015

This volume presents a collection of research papers on how to foster the learning and teaching of pragmatic phenomena, as well as on how to administer tests that assess pragmatic competence in second/foreign language education with regard to several target languages. The topics investigated include: speech acts; computer-mediated communication; conversation analysis; pragmatic, intercultural and emotional competence; native and non-native performance; data collection and instructional methods; needs analysis; and syllabus design and materials development. The contributions will be relevant to linguists, language learners and teachers, teacher trainers, and communication experts.

2018

Today Ukraine is in the process of reforming the educational system in the aviation industry aimed at providing a sufficient number of skilled and competent specialists for international air transport effective operation, management and maintenance. Bringing the existing practices of studying, the criteria and standards of education to compliance with European requirements, implementing innovative solutions for attracting, and training a new generation of aviation specialists have become of paramount importance nowadays. The process of learning Aviation English involves mastering both a narrow aspect of standard special phraseology and a wide range of conversational aviation lexes, combining them with a view of effective professional communication through everyday language practice. Traditionally professionally-oriented teaching a foreign language was carried out in the framework of the communicative approach, focusing on the formation of speech and linguistic skills of communicatio...

2017

Aeronautical English differs from general English, so it has to be learned by native speakers of English. The author refers to the particular role this group of speakers is required to play in aviation settings. The article presents Aeronautical English in current use by reference to selected communication strategies native English speaking operational personnel employ when communicating orally with non-native partners of ICAO Level 4. The article investigates the usefulness of such strategies based on real-life examples. To this end, it seems obvious that not only non-native English speaking pilots and controllers are supposed to employ communication strategies in order to avoid misunderstanding, but also their native English speaking colleagues.