Raising EFL teachers' awareness of L2 pragmatic teaching via teacher professional development: the impact of an effective training workshop

Abstract

Second language (L2) pragmatics has been identified to be under-represented in EFL textbooks and generally neglected in English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching curriculums and teacher training programs despite its well-established status in L2 teaching research. Adopting the repeated measures design, this study examines the effectiveness of a professional development (PD) event in L2 pragmatics teaching for Vietnamese EFL high school teachers. Its effect was measured using pre-training and post-training questionnaires completed by 43 participating teachers. The findings showed that the training workshop exhibited positive effects in raising the teachers’ awareness of L2 pragmatics and its teaching and enhancing their knowledge of these areas. Furthermore, the PD intervention resulted in a potential model for effective PD in the form of training workshops in low-resource contexts like Vietnam. The study thereby implies the need for more PD activities in L2 pragmatics teaching so that L2 pragmatics could be included in EFL classrooms in a principled and systematic way.