Teaching Pragmatics Through Projects: A Students’ Perspective

Abstract

In order to communicate effectively in the workplace, the professional translators, interpreters, communication, and public relations specialists make linguistic choices that help them achieve their goals. One way to teach them how to reach the appropriate linguistic decisions is through the discipline of Pragmatics. The originality of the present paper lies in the fact that it proposes a new approach to teaching Pragmatics that aims at creating a dynamic educational context, namely by means of projects. For 2 years in a row, students from the Faculty of Communication Sciences at Politehnica University of Timişoara (Romania), specializing in Translation and Interpreting or Communication and Public Relations, have carried out a project for this discipline and presented it to the class. Then, they have reflected on the tasks and their experience through a sixteen-question questionnaire, created by the researchers and distributed online, using Google forms. Most of the 164 respondents have pointed out the usefulness of the projects to better acquire the concepts in Pragmatics and to improve their soft skills, even if the curriculum of each of the two specializations dedicates a different number of hours to the discipline.