A task-based teaching proposal for raising awareness of commissive speech acts through English modal verbs

Abstract

This paper focuses on one of the latest and much integrated subdomains of linguistics – pragmatics – with the objective of bringing forward a proposal on teaching the commissive speech acts (promises and threats) expressed through modal verbal units. This is meant to help students internalize this linguistic function, which will, in turn aid them to take part in daily conversations and other activities, such as reading, writing and listening to English excerpts, thus integrating the pragmatic competence into other skills. The study, hence, proposes to facilitate the understanding and use of these language strategies, since commissives are a very common type of speech acts. Moreover, a task-based approach is adopted in designing the teaching plan, as it is one of the best communicative teaching techniques, allowing students to learn through meaningful interaction and being proved to bring positive results to the language learners.