Remote Teaching and Speech-Act Theory: Some Preliminary Thoughts

I’ve been spending a lot of my weekends lately thinking through what the various theoretical frameworks of remote teaching and learning that we find ourselves in would and could look like. Last weekend I started to frame an article on the sensory and pedagogy that I will be working on slowly in the new year.

This weekend I am back with thoughts of an old favourite of mine J.L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words and speech-act theory. I suppose both the sensory aspect of my thoughts and this focus on Austin in my head this weekend are connected in some way. Both, and this is something that I am still working through, thus the preliminary thoughts in the title, expose gaps in what we are experiencing in remote teaching and learning. This blog is going to be a few thoughts as I work through what may be a subsequent blog post during the holiday season. 

In the speech-act theory frame I believe there is a lot of speech-act gaps happening from the locutionary “your courses will be taught online” which has the illocutionary weight of “students will be learning online,” but without the same perlocutionary effect that instructors and students are used to. The naming of things within this remote teaching and learning environment also has a lot of weight. We go into “break-out rooms” but what are we breaking out of? And can we really break-out of something when we are simply moving from one virtual space to another and not in fact to anotherlearning space? The different modality of engagement means there is a difference to what teaching “looks” like or even “feels” like. 

Last week I did an impromptu poll on Twitter to see who is actually thinking of those feels, of the sensory of online pedagogy, the majority of the respondents (though my n was really low, like under 20) said they think of the sensory in their pedagogical design less than 50% of the time. There is a cooperative principle at the heart of every speech act. For a speech act to “work” both those who locute and those who receive need to somehow be on the same page in terms of what the locutionary is to mean to the illocutionary and perlocutionary weight. 

A classroom lecture is always already necessarily a speech-act event. The naming of a lecture states the performance of the act. I am lecturing when I lecture. But this lecturing space and performance doesn’t translate in a neat one-to-one ratio online and this is where the gaps happen; this is where content is misunderstood. This is to say that there are levels of nomenclature, performance, presence, and absence that is assumed in this teaching paradigm that I do not even think are on people’s radars, neither the instructors or the learners, because we are all simply trying to engage and make it to a time when there is a “break” to reflect on it all. We are only now getting to the point where folk are acknowledging, maybe (massive hedging here), the need to first approach with trauma awareness instead of a “business as usual model” which is healthier for all involved, instructors and learners.

Teaching remotely in whatever form you choose to engage in it, be it lecturing, or asynchronous pieces that students approach on their own time, is an act that is by its very nature distanced. Because we are in a time where any promissory speech act is conditional on the state of the world and what changes happen due to the pandemic, we can’t even say “ I promise to look at these concepts more in-depth next semester in my planning” because there may certainly be other priorities.  As I say these are some preliminary thoughts that I am still framing but some things that do come out these preliminary thoughts are:

• We need to pay attention to what we are naming things and the connotative weight of words in our remote teaching spaces
• We need to identify the gaps that are present by the nature of the modality and how the pedagogy sits upon and within that modality
• We need to acknowledge that the perlocutionary effect of a locutionary act is disrupted by this modality.  

There is certainly more and I welcome any thoughts and feedback, particularly from the linguists.