Meaningful learning for fostering the students’ pragmatic competence

Meaningful learning is much considerably appreciated in any learning activities. Under the background of psychology of education, Ausubel promotes his state of the art which is commonly called meaningful learning as opposed to rote memorization. It requires active and creative mind of learners’ in any environmental and contextual settings, well-organized and relevant knowledge structures, emotional commitment to integrate the new with existing knowledge, and conceptual clear subject matter. This study is aimed at (1) analyzing and describing the ability of meaningful learning in fostering the students’ pragmatic competence, (2) analyzing and describing the challenges and things to do for them in performing meaningful learning. The data of this study are the students’ pragmatic competence realized in their performance in using language pragmatically in a diglossic situation. They are collected by employing the observation and interview, then are analyzed by using what is introduced by Yin (2011) covering five phases: 1) compiling, 2) disassembling, 3) reassembling, 4) interpreting, and 5) concluding. The result reveals that meaningful learning with its variables such as open work, motivation, environment, creativity, concept map, and curricular adaptation is able to foster the students’ pragmatic competence in performing verbal communication in a diglossic situation. They pragmatically use language under the control of distant language vs close language, politeness vs camaraderie, and object language vs metalanguage. In meaningful learning practice in this study, some challenges are found such as the departmental supports, the organizational/institutional supports, the learning environment, and the corporate culture. Answering the challenges, some considerably meaningful efforts sucessfully performed such as socializing the meaningful learning program to any settings of related parties, creating the supporting environment, elaborating building-blocks of meaningful learning for fostering pragmatic competence, and re-engineering the corporate culture