English Lessons in a University Using a Movie : A Case Study for Developing Students’ Pragmatic Ability

The present study illustrates how an English movie can be utilized to improve students’ pragmatic ability of the English language in an English classroom in a university, and how students reacted to them. The teaching materials were used in four experimental lessons, which were designed based on the two aspects of students’ pragmatic ability such as pragmatic knowledge and pragmatic performance. Through analyzing their comments on questionnaire surveys and worksheets, we examined how an English movie is effective as a teaching material for improving students’ pragmatic ability. The results showed that students who stated that they worked on the activities using their knowledge they got from the imagery and the sounds of the movie wrote the correct answers on the worksheets which require understanding the context of the script. The results also proved that combining the two aspects of pragmatic ability mentioned above to create worksheets is helpful to improve students’ pragmatic ability to a limited extend