Using Cultural Pragmatic Schemata in Improving Students’ Communicative Skills
Hussain Al Sharoufi
Gulf University for Science and Technology – State of Kuwait
Abstract
This study investigates the usefulness of using cultural pragmatic schemas in improving Arab students’ communicative skills. Linguistic behavior is reflected through repetitive patterns of highly organized cultural repertoires. To better understand the relationship between such repertoires and actual language used by interlocutors, Sharifian suggested a new framework for studying cultural pragmatic schema. A group of Gulf University for Science and Technology students was given sets of specific speech acts, and were asked to apply them in pertinent contexts. Having discerned the synergy between speech acts, as action verbs, pragmemes, as contextualised speech acts, and practs, as concrete manifestations of such acts, students have become more aware of the use and effectiveness of pragmatic schemas. They have become more confident in using pragmatic schemas in achieving their communicative goals. There is a great amount of cultural knowledge that is deliberately ignored in the English classroom because of prioritizing monolingualism. This erroneous technique erodes time and effort in the process of teaching and learning English as a foreign language. Making use of cultural pragmatic schema would give students a better opportunity to compare cultural strategies in manifesting a particular linguistic structure. As David Crystal emphasizes, all linguistic levels are subservient to Pragmatics, which clearly means that teaching cultural pragmatic strategies in L1 would definitely buttress and improve the teaching and learning of L2. The conceptual knowledge that students bring to the ELT classes may best be viewed as assets and resources that could be drawn upon in developing metacultural competence in learners. This knowledge should be given to learners at an appropriate stage where they can perceive the difference between the two cultural systems. I asked a group of 15 Kuwaiti students at the Gulf University for Science and Technology in Kuwait to provide sets of culturally accepted sayings and to engage in conversations, in which situated speech acts, pragmemes, play an important role in manifesting action in conversations using the Kuwaiti dialect. Introducing students to a number of cultural schemas and letting them compare those ones with their English counterparts, if any, helped them understand the difference in cultural repertoires in both Arabic and English.