Corpus Pragmatics and Multimodality: Compiling an ad-hoc Multimodal Corpus for EFL Pragmatics Teaching

Abstract

The teaching and acquisition of foreign language pragmatics as a part of the communicative competence paradigm has been reported as essential since the deviation from the Chomskian competence-based model to a more performative one in the ´80s. Despite this change, only a few course books include or are designed on a teaching pragmatics basis. As an alternative, adapting and supplementing already existing course books with pragmatic content is the current trend. This paper takes a new look at materials design by merging pragmatics, corpus linguistics, and multimodality. The aim of this study is twofold: first, a specialized multimodal ad-hoc corpus was compiled in order to apply corpus pragmatics methodologies and search for multiple speech acts. Second, the development of an instructional model for the teaching of pragmatics in the English as a foreign language classroom is described. Thus, a specialised multimodal corpus from two TV series was compiled and edited using subtitles transcripts and the software Notepad++. Then, a quantitative and qualitative data analysis was performed through the use of AntConc freeware Clusters/n-grams and Concordance Plot tools. Results revealed the presence of multiple speech acts’ direct, indirect and conventionalised realizations that allowed for the design of a teaching proposal that tackles both sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic aspects.