In Their Own Voices: Reflections of Native and Nonnative English Speaking TESOL Graduate Students on On-Line Pragmatic Instruction to EFL Learners

In this paper I discuss a study that involved incorporating instructional pragmatics into an ESL Methodology course. Graduate students who were taking an ESL Methodology course were required to read the literature on interlanguage and instructional pragmatics and teach requestive speech act strategies to Taiwanese EFL students through computer-mediated communication (CMC). Students' reflective journals, online discussions, and instructor's field notes were analyzed qualitatively for emergent themes. 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 project and what challenges they faced as they taught pragmatics to EFL learners through the use of CMC. Suggestions for ESL teacher education programs are provided and ideas for further research are provided at the end. (Contains 1 table.)