Pragmatics – English Language A Level Unit

A 9 lesson unit comprising a 69 slide PowerPoint, 9 different worksheets (8 include a text or texts for analysis) and a summary terminology and theory sheet, exploring the topic of pragmatics. This unit can be used for any of the major exam boards.

Each lesson includes a starting discussion prompt which acts as a learning objective, detailed notes on the terminology listed below, a worksheet containing a text (or revision cards for lesson 9), and a homework task. The following terminology is covered:

• Negotiation of meaning: confirmation checks, reformulation techniques and feedback
• Codes: inference and implication
• Implicatures and pragmatic illusion
• Ambiguity
• Schema and schematic knowledge
• Embodied knowledge
• Cooperative Principle and Gricean Maxims – Paul Grice (1975)
• Speech acts: assertives (analytic and synthetic); commissives; declarations (verdictive and effective); directives; and expressives.
• Face – Erving Goffman (1967)
• Politeness theory and face threatening acts – Penelope Brown and Steven Levinson (1987)
• Deixis: personal, spatial and temporal; distal and proximal
• Presupposition: presupposition negation test; definitive descriptions; factive verbs; iteratives; questions; temporal clauses

(Please note that there is overlap on six slides about Grice’s maxims, face and politeness theory with the ‘Analysing Discourse – Spoken Language’ unit.)

The final lesson is a consolidation activity complete with guided revision cards. Alternatively, you could use an app such as Quizlet so that the students could produce digital revision resources.