Pragmatic Competence in Oral Discourse in SFL: A Study of Dislocation as a Discourse Strategy

Abstract

In every communicative act, the speaker has to adapt their informative contribution to the interlocutor, all while taking in consideration their communicative purpose, the pragmatic information they think to have recognised in the interlocutor and the sum of the contextual factors. The resulting structuring of information using linguistic resources shows their proficiency in the linguistic code and their pragmatic competence, and therefore constitutes a field that every FL learner must master if they wish their communication to be adequate, fluent and natural. Regardless, the information structure is a subject that receives little attention in the SFL teaching and learning, which is evident in its relative absence in didactic materials. The aim of the present study is to analyse the discursive use that the SFL students with different mother tongues give in their oral discourse to a particular method of information structuring, the dislocation, which forms part of a broader mechanism of thematization or topicalization. Only by observing what discourse strategies the students recognise in the dislocation, it will be possible to undertake a path towards a more systematic and efficient approach to the subject in class. Therefore, the article briefly describes what dislocation is, examines what place it currently occupies with information structure in SFL and, most of all, analyses how the SFL students with different mother tongues exploit the discourse possibilities of this mechanism in their oral discourse. The study is part of the project PRACOMUL (Pragmatic competence from a multilingual perspective) which aims to create a collaborative learning community based on an interactive platform (www.pracomul.si) that enables virtual oral encounters between SFL learners with different mother tongues and stimulates the development of the pragmatic competence.