10:00am-10:30am

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AGNES HONG
What’s so Difficult? A Look at What Students Need to Know for L2 Reading
You’ll be hard pressed to find a ESL reading and writing teacher who has not heard their students complain that an assigned reading is “too hard”.  After all, reading in a second language is a complex activity.  To better understand what L2 learners are up against when they read in English, we need to first look at what reading involves.  Schema theory describes the process by which readers combine their own background knowledge with the information in a text to comprehend that text.  The presenter employs the schema theory to establish a particular view on what reading is and uses the same as the framework to examine the role of background knowledge in ESL reading comprehension.  This presentation provides preliminary findings of the foregoing investigation.

10:35am-11:00am

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KIRA KONDRATKOVA
Reconcilable Differences: Pragmatics to Help Russian EFL Learners Bridge the Gap
This presentation reviews recent research on pragmatic norms for requests, focusing on the pragmatics of polite requests and cultural differences in politeness. It further explores how American and Russian cultures are different pragmatically in forming requests and looks at studies published in Russian language to have multiple perspectives on the issue of teaching pragmatics. It goes on to present analysis of Russian high school EFL textbooks, which examines whether the tasks sufficiently convey the variation of pragmatic structures. The presenter concludes with pedagogical implications for enhancing Russian learners’ knowledge of pragmatics through implementing additional activities into the lessons.

11:15am-11:40am

JIADAI LIU

Integrating Pragmatics Materials in Advanced Reading and Writing ESL Course
This project first examines different aspects of pragmatic competence that ESL learners need to develop in order to succeed when completing literacy tasks as well as when learning in an ESL reading and writing classroom. Then, sample teaching materials targeting an advanced ESL reading and writing course will be demonstrated and categorized in a framework. The framework contains ten categories, and ideally, one material will be created for each category.

11:45am - 12:10pm

YASKO TASHIRO

Reflections on jump-starting L2 learning: Does progress ever come to a halt?

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