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In the Mood

Introducing Pragmatic Awareness at Low Levels

Edit H. Kontra
Eötvös University, Hungary

Level: Elementary and upwards

Time: Ten to twenty minutes at a time

Resources: Mood-cards, simple course-book dialogs, role cards

Goal: To raise awareness of communicating more than what is said

Description of the activity
Pragmatics, among other things, is the study of communicating more than what is said (Yule, 1996). Pragmatic awareness is easy to bring about at higher levels, but it can also be accomplished at a stage when learners barely speak a word of the foreign language. In the awareness raising activities described below, the "more" that is communicated is the speaker's mood.

The term 'mood' is used here in a broad sense of the word. Speakers are always in a definable mood, they are happy or angry, anxious, worried or upset, bored or eager, impressed or wanting to impress. The fact that the mood influences what we say and how we say it does not come as a revelation to the foreign language learner, but awareness needs to be raised and practice needs to be provided in the foreign language classroom. Via simple conversational exchanges students can practice expressing their real or assumed mood and can observe how the mood changes their own language and the language of their conversational partner.

The activities described here can be presented as a whole or in successive parts or phases within one or more classes. The procedure section suggests a gradual lead into pragmatic awareness with the aid of so called "mood-cards." These cards can be made using magazine cut-outs; photocopies of pictures in books; "happy face" type simple drawings, as suggested by Wright (1979 pp. 123-124), or they can be word cards.

The students practice scripted and non-scripted dialogs. Although textbook dialogs are intended to be realistic, we find that under closer examination they are stripped of everything that would make them real. The language is carefully chosen to be polite, friendly, and neutral bordering on sterility. The characters in the books have everything but character. However, we all know that what we say is influenced not only by our character, but also by our mood at the time we are speaking, our attitude towards the person we are speaking to, the power relationship between the speakers, and the situation itself. Going to the office in the morning, one might utter the greeting "Good morning" in a dozen different ways. When said to the newspaper boy in the street, the neighbor whose party kept the whole street awake last night, the boss with a threatening look in his face, the colleague who looks a bit distressed, the secretary looking particularly pretty today, the receptionist who one passes hurriedly, or the executive who always pretends not to hear, the short phrase carries a range of additional meanings. Even behind the simple sentence "Mother, I'm home," there is a whole life story. When doing mood activities, teachers can both raise pragmatic awareness and inject fun into what otherwise would be a routine practice of a speaking skill.

Procedure
1) The teacher puts the letters "Mm..." or "Oh…" on the chalkboard and asks the students to try to read out loud what they see in as many different ways as they can. Volunteers demonstrate. After three or four different intonation patterns the teacher asks the volunteers to repeat what they said and asks the class to put into words what they heard. Expected interpretations for "Mm" can be: pleasure ("Delicious"), astonishment ("What?"), disagreement ("No, no"), desire ("Let's have that"). How the interpretations are verbalized depends on the level of the group. This phase is closed by the teacher eliciting from students that it was the intonation of the speaker that carried the meaning.

2) The teacher brings in three or four pictures of people's faces depicting different facial expressions, for instance anger, happiness, excitement, and boredom. The teacher asks the students to say simple words or phrases as the people in the pictures would. Words for practice could be practically anything, e.g., "Money," "Ice cream," or "Here." One student says the chosen word in a particular way and the others match one of the faces to it. The phase is closed by the teacher introducing four to six more mood-cards.

3) In this phase the students get a simple dialog, preferably one they know from their course-book. Two students act out the dialog as they normally would. Then the teacher asks two different students to choose a mood and act out the dialog again. Following each scene students attempt to identify the mood of each speaker. After a few turns the students reflect on how the adopted mood affected the language used. Comments usually refer to the lengthening or shortening of utterances, the rhythm of speech, and the intonation of the sentences. At somewhat higher levels, the students usually change the text of the scripted dialogs slightly by adding a few words or phrases.

4) At very low levels phase four should follow on a different occasion. At higher levels this phase can actually replace phase three. Students are given role-cards (Figure 1) or are asked to act out a scenario (Figure 2). Course books written with the functional- notional approach (e.g., Functions of American English by Jones & von Baeyer, 1983) contain a wide variety of situations that can be used successfully, such as giving opinions, refusing invitations, and complaining. When students are familiar with their roles, a mood-card is given to everyone. These can be picture cards or word cards describing a particular mood or attitude. In the feedback session students can be asked to reflect on how the mood affected their language use. An interesting alternative is to set up the role-play in the usual way, then stop it while it is still in progress to slip a mood-card into the students' hands (Figure 3).

Rationale
At the dawn of the communicative approach many teachers believed that the language, that is, structures and lexis, had to be taught using traditional methods, and only then could students be initiated into communication. Although many years have passed, that attitude has not completely disappeared from the foreign language teaching scene. Today, it seems, pragmatics is being given similar treatment. If pragmatic awareness-raising is given any emphasis in the foreign language classroom, it tends to be at the upper intermediate or advanced levels, often as high as the education class for non-native teachers. In the activity described above, I intended to demonstrate that there is no reason for delay because awareness-raising can be effective at low levels, and what is more, it can be fun.

Teacher Resource

Figure One: Role-cards

Figure Two: Scene - Making requests

Using post-it labels the teacher gives everyone a tag to say who they are, e.g., boss, boss's wife, receptionist, colleague, visitor, elevator boy, best friend, a child, etc. On a card, everyone gets a list of favors to ask for, e. g., answer the phone, lend an umbrella, lend money, make some tea, feed the cat, call a cab, etc. Possible moods: friendly, rude, busy, tired, nosy, jealous, etc. Format: Students mingle; anyone can go up to anyone. It is up to the students to decide whether they grant the favor or not.

Figure Three: Changing the mood

A student is trying to find a place to rent, calling different numbers from ads in the paper. The conversation partner is the owner of a place to rent. Students usually start out the conversation in neutral and polite language, but if the landlord's mood-card says that this is the 50th call today and he is fed up having to repeat the same things all over again, or the student's card says that it is getting late and he has to find a place today no matter what, the conversations take interesting turns.

 

References
Jones, L. & von Baeyer (1983). Functions of American English. Communication activities for the classroom. Student's Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wright, A. (1976). Visual materials for the language teacher. London: Longman Group Limited.

Yule, G. (1996). Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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