Deixis and EFL reading comprehension.(English as a Foreign Language )

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to determine the effect of deixis as pragmatic residues on EFL reading comprehension and to find out whether the injection of deictic expressions in reading passages would jeopardize or hamper the comprehension of the readers at all different levels of language proficiency.

Introduction

Reading is a complex activity which involves identification of letters, recognition of words, visual discrimination and thereby sampling of ideas, predicting the forthcoming content and decoding the intended meaning of the message. (Varzegar, 1993) Reading is a process of idea construction, confirmation, rejection and semantic interpretation.(Varzegar, 1993). Varzegar(2003)asserts that reading is a process of recognition of words and structures while associating meaning with them and understanding the contextual, conceptual, scriptual, schematic and pragmatic meanings which lead to a more global and holistic comprehension. Comprehension of a text involves seeing the interrelationships, intrarelationships and suprarelationships of sentences, paragraphs, the organization of longer passages and many other factors. The reader may read sentence by sentence and comprehend the individual sentences, but fail to extract the meaning of the text because he does not grasp the pragmatic residues (Levinson, 1983), such as deictic expressions in the passage. Moreover, the ultimate goal of reading is comprehension and the optimal level of comprehension is "demessaging" (Carton, 1976) the printed page. Varzegar (2001) maintains that demessaging goes beyond the linguistic aspects of the text and brings the extralinguitic, discoursal, scriptual, schematic and pragmatic knowledge into the reading act.

Furthermore, there are two basic processes involved in comprehension: (1) decoding and (2) demessaging. "Decoding is the process of trying to understand the meaning of a word, phrase, or sentence" (Pratt and Weber, 1985, p. 73) and demessaging is the scriptual, schematic and pragmatic aspects of comprehension" (Varzegar, 1995, p.112). Carton(1976) believes that the message cannot be truly comprehended unless it is demessaged. Barnitz (1985) sums up three essential elements of an adequate

model reading. First, reading is "multileveled" in that readers use of various levels of language simultaneously to access meaning. Readers use their "pragmatic," discoursal, syntactic, morphological and phonological knowledge in constructing and reconstructing meaning. Second, reading is "interactive," in that the reader's comprehension is driven by the knowledge structures or schemata of the reader and the specific content and linguistic structures in the text. All levels of background knowledge (linguistic, social, conceptual)interact simultaneously as the reader extracts meaning from the text. Third, reading involves the generation of hypotheses as the reader makes predictions about the meaning of a text.

To conclude, one should take into account that reading is an active, interactive (Rumelhart, 1979),transactional (Rosenbalt, 1994), interactive-compensatory (Stanovich, 1980) process in which not only the reader's background knowledge (schema) interacts with what is on the printed page, but also different levels of his/her competence; that is, linguistic, communicative, schematic and pragmatic competencies interact with each other. There also exists an interaction between all sub-components of language, such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and super components of language, such as discourse and pragmatics, as well as an interaction between all other language skills. The modern usage of the term PRAGMATICS is attributable to the philosopher Charles Morris (1938), who was concerned to outline the general shape of a science of signs, or semiotics. Pragmatics is the study of "the relation of signs to interpreters (Levinson, 1983). Carnap (1938) defines pragmatics as such: "If in an investigation explicit reference is made to the speaker, or to put it in more general terms, to the user of the language, then we assign it to the field of pragmatics."