Minggu, 27 Juli 2008

प्रग्मटिक अप्प्रोअच इन लिस्तेनिंग क्लास

1. Introduction
In globalization era, the world is becoming interconnected with existing political, cultural, and economic boundaries being superseded. Relation between countries and people are no longer bounded and moreover, direct interaction is not always needed. The increasing of communication technology in recent years had made invention and innovation in mass media. News papers and radio are no longer dominating information circulation and entertainment services. At this point, we should admit that language capability is certainly needed in term of acknowledging other people. This paper would examine the domain of English conversation related to listening ability in English student. Writer proposes that the using of pragmatic approach in listening class would be much helpful as well. As the ball rolling, let’s begin the discussion.
2. Discussion
English nowadays can be found easily in our daily life. There are English on our screen, news paper, movie, theatre, song, poetry, novel, etc. MTV and box office are the examples of some certain media that use English as language. Both of them are American product and reflect American society. First of all, why English? Why don’t we talk about French, German, or other language but English? In international relation, English has become lingua franca, a language which unites all speakers from all of nation and culture. Further more, Conrad (in Darjowidjojo, 2002) calls English as language of wider communication. It means that English used in vary field such economic, social, politic, and culture. Most of international organization use English as medium to communicate and make agreement. In fact, there are some countries uses English as their first language even though they are not come from American or British island. Malaysia, India, Singapore, Brunei Darussalam, and other ex of British colonies in south eastern Asia are the examples. In this case, political history influenced the spread of English in Asia especially in eastern Asia. Indonesia has different history of course regarding this British colonialism since it is Dutch who colonialized Indonesia. Even so, English comes in Indonesia trough others media.
The using of English nowadays similarly grows in Indonesia and it makes its educational system arrange curriculum specifically in guide student to studying English. One of the skill arranged in English learning is listening besides speaking, writing and of course, grammar and structure. Listening is following and understanding the sound---it is hearing with a purpose. Good listening is built on three basic skills: attitude, attention, and adjustment. These skills are known collectively as triple-A listening. More over, listening is the absorption of the meanings of words and sentences by the brain. Listening leads to the understanding of facts and ideas. But listening takes attention, or sticking to the task at hand in spite of distractions. It requires concentration, which is the focusing of your thoughts upon one particular problem. A person who incorporates listening with concentration is actively listening. Active listening is a method of responding to another that encourages communication.
Listening is a very important skill, especially for English second language students. Many of them tend to talk too much during a class. This defeats the purpose of learning, which is to allow students to learn by discussion. Rather than turning the class into a rigid interaction room, students must actively listen and encourage themselves to become active learners. Expressing our wants, feelings, thoughts and opinions clearly and effectively is only half of the communication process needed for interpersonal effectiveness. The other half is listening and understanding what others communicate to us. When a person decides to communicate with another person, he/she does so to fulfill a need. The person wants something, feels discomfort, and/or has feelings or thoughts about something. In deciding to communicate, the person selects the method or code which he/she believes will effectively deliver the message to the other person. The code used to send the message can be either verbal or nonverbal. When the other person receives the coded message, they go through the process of decoding or interpreting it into understanding and meaning. Effective communication exists between two people when the receiver interprets and understands the sender’s message in the same way the sender intended it.
In linguistic studies, there is a theory which helps to understand culture critically called as speech act. Speech act used in analyzing asks not what form the utterance takes but what it does. Saying "I now pronounce you man and wife" enacts a marriage. Studying speech acts such as complimenting allows discourse analysts to ask what counts as a compliment, who gives compliments to whom, and what other function they can serve.
Listening class, based on elucidation above, should apply pragmatic approach as well as it would measure the using of phrase and idiom in daily English speaking. Pragmatic comprehension refers to the comprehension of oral language in terms of pragmatic meaning. English language learners need to be able to comprehend meaning pragmatically in order to:
understand a speaker's intentions;
interpret a speaker's feelings and attitudes;
differentiate speech act meaning, such as the difference between a directive and a commissive;
evaluate the intensity of a speaker's meaning, such as the difference between a suggestion and a warning;
recognize sarcasm, joking, and other facetious behavior; and
be able to respond appropriately.
In one model of pragmatic ability, pragmatic comprehension can be characterized as comprehension of speech acts and conversational implicatures. In speech acts, the speaker is trying to do something or trying to get the hearer to do something (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969). In conversational implicatures, the speaker expresses attitudes and feelings using indirect utterances that must be inferred by the hearer. The comprehension of pragmatic meaning can be differentiated from linguistic comprehension because it requires the listener to understand not only linguistic information, such as vocabulary and syntax, but also contextual information, such as the role and status of the interlocutor, the physical setting of the conversation, and the types of communicative acts that would likely occur in that context (Van Dijk, 1977).
Comprehension of speech acts and conversational implicatures involves the integration of information from a wide range of linguistic sources (such as phonetic, syntactic, and semantic) to comprehend a contextually appropriate utterance that reveals a speaker's intentions and attitude. In the comprehension of speech acts, the hearer recognizes what the speaker is doing with an utterance; in other words, the hearer must be able to understand the supporting information and respond to it. In everyday language use, people use speech acts to do things such as make requests, give advice, and extend offers and invitations.
In the comprehension of conversational implicatures, the listener recognizes what the speaker thinks; in other words, the hearer infers the speaker's attitudes or feelings. Interpretations are based on the assumption that the speaker is communicating co-operatively. Hearers use a process of hypothesis formation and confirmation in order to arrive at the correct interpretation of an utterance. The hearer assumes that the speaker's utterance is relevant to the previous discourse and seeks the most relevant and accessible interpretation of the intended meaning, usually deriving meaning from the context of the talk. Take for example the following exchange between two roommates:
A: Are the neighbors on vacation?B: I haven't seen their car all week.
In this exchange, speaker B provides an answer that requires speaker A to infer that the neighbors are on vacation because speaker B does not explicitly say, "Yes, they are," or "Yes, I think they are." Although speaker B's answer appears to be a violation of grammar, it is, in fact, entirely relevant. The seeming violation becomes a signal to the hearer that more is being said than what is on the surface level; that is, speaker B hasn't seen the car, and therefore, he thinks the neighbors are indeed on vacation. Levinson (1983) explained that speakers do not always "adhere to these maxims on a superficial level, but rather that, wherever possible people will interpret what we say as conforming to maxims on at least some level" (p. 103).
Van Dijk (1977) proposed a theory of pragmatic comprehension made up of two main processes: context analysis and utterance analysis. In context analysis, language users analyze the meaning of an utterance based on the context in which it was uttered by using background knowledge, past experiences, and knowledge of social rules. They also apply their own expectations of plausible goals of the speaker and expectation of the kinds of utterances that are likely to take place in that particular context. They decide which information to focus attention on, for example, the location of an interaction rather than the hair color of the speaker.
Context analysis provides only a part of the information used to comprehend pragmatically; comprehension must finally be based on an analysis of the utterance itself. In utterance analysis, language users analyze semantic (e.g., speech parts, modality), syntactic (e.g., sentence forms, word order), lexical (e.g., word choice, fixed phrases), phonological (e.g., intonation, stress), and paralinguistic (e.g., gesticulation, facial expressions) information to interpret the meaning of an utterance.
For English student whom are studying English as foreign language, who may not have sufficient linguistic skills to fully interpret an utterance at the surface level, the ability to comprehend pragmatic meaning can be problematic. Unfamiliar communicative situations and over-reliance on linguistic cues may contribute to English learners' difficulty in matching the utterance to a familiar context, thus hindering comprehension.
The problem of breaking down the pragmatic comprehension construct into speech acts and conversational implicatures has not been explored sufficiently in the listening class. This aspect needs to be worked out so that we can approach the various dimensions of pragmatic comprehension in language teaching, materials development, and language testing.
3. Conclusion
Pragmatic listening comprehension is an area of language ability that has not been investigated sufficiently considering its importance in the communicative competence models. The findings from this study distinguish pragmatic comprehension as a separate language skill from linguistic comprehension. They also show how pragmatic comprehension can be further classified into comprehension of speech acts and comprehension of conversational implicatures. These findings contribute to our understanding of the pragmatic comprehension construct. Language learning methodologists and researchers would be interested in investigating further this multi-faceted construct for use in language learning materials and assessments.
Another important observation is that the use of naturally-occurring language samples from authentic contexts, such as those found in a corpus, provide listening prompts that tap pragmatic comprehension abilities better than contrived examples can. Still, much more research on the construct of pragmatic comprehension needs to be done to fully understand this important component of communicative competence.
References
Austin, J. L. (1962, rep. 1975). How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Searle, J. (1969). Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van Dijk, T. A. (1977). Context and cognition: Knowledge frames and speech act comprehension. Journal of Pragmatics, 1, 211-232.