A01 cohe4573 01 se fm. Qxd

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G R O U N D I N G I N T H E T E A C H I N G A N D L E A R N I N G O F L 2 P R A G M A T I C S
the language or the culture of the speakers.
17
Compared to a written DCT, a
role-play tends to be more interactive and spontaneous, and thus is likely to
yield more naturalistic discourse.
18
For the purpose of language teaching, we would first encourage you to be
familiar with the potential pros and cons of elicitation measures (which will
be discussed in Activity 3.1, below). Having this awareness would allow 
you to select suitable procedure(s) from a range of data collection strategies,
including recording or field observation of naturally occurring conversa-
tions, which we now discuss.
Field observation or recording of natural
conversation
Because elicited data lack spontaneity and may come across as contrived,
you may say that natural speech would serve best as the source of pragmatic
language samples in the classroom. Collecting tape- or video-recordings 
of natural conversation may be simpler and yield more accurate data than
trying to take down the language verbatim. Transcribed examples of natural
data can be found in Chapters 8 and 9. A downside of this procedure would
be that we usually need to obtain permission for recording ahead of time
and need to make sure that the speakers talk naturally without being overly
self-conscious. We will discuss organization of natural conversation and the
suitability of naturally occurring data in Chapter 9. Examples of natural
conversations can be found in Activity 3.1 (below).
Making use of field observation techniques, we could carefully record
natural conversations we overhear or engage in. We could take notes on, for
example:
■
what people say;
■
their tone of voice;
■
their gestures; and
■
their eye-contact.
We would also record relevant contextual factors such as those appearing
below, to the extent that they can be known or guessed from the context:
■
the physical location/situation;
■
the age of the speakers;
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Hinkel (1997); Rose (1994a); Rose and Ono (1995).
18
Kasper and Dahl (1991).

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C O L L E C T I N G D A T A R E F L E C T I N G T H E P R A G M A T I C U S E O F L A N G U A G E