Plenary speeches

Teaching and assessing L2 pragmatics: What can we expert from learners? By Andrew D. Cowen (2008)

New Words
-The council has plenary powers to administer the agreement.
-My daughter is learning English through osmosis.
-The job entails a lot of hard work.
-Illocution is an action performed by speaking or writing, for example ordering, warning or promising.
-Perlocution is an act of speaking or writing which has an action as its aim, but which does not itself perform that action, for example persuading or convincing.
-The performance produced much mirth among the audience.
-Tests at the age of seven provide a benchmark against which the child’s progress at school can be measured.
-There has been a upsurge of interest in his movies recently.
-We pay a salary commensurate with your performance.
-I would like to express my gratitude to everyone for their hard work.
-Traditional stories make use of formulaic expressions like ‘Once upon a time…’.
-Keypal is a person that you regularly send emails to, often you have never met the person.
-These figures have been gleaned from a number of studies.
-Intensifier is a word, especially an adjective or an adverb, for example so or very, that makes the meaning of another word stronger
-They have introduced a new system whereby all employees must undergo regular training.
-An avatar is a picture of a person or an animal which represents a person, on a computer screen, especially in a computer game or chat room.

My Idea
It is difficult to assess speaking test because of the difficulty of setting criteria. As speaking has been focused at Japanese school recently, teachers have to manage to deal with it. I’m interested in the use of CALL (computer-assisted language learning). Computers play an important role in our society. I think they give studying motivation to students. I’d like to use computers as both studying tools and studying materials because computer networking systems are in the process of being introduced into Japanese classrooms.