Sociopragmatic In English Language Research

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2.3 Sociopragmatic and English Language Teaching
2. 3. 1 Should sociopragmatic be taught?
Despite the fact that pragmatic failure is a crucial cause of lack of succcesful communication, teachers, curriculum designers, and textbook writers have roughly all the way pay no attention to it. Why this happens and why they favour to stay on the more trustworthy arena of grammar is not hard to explain. First of all, pragmatic account has not yet arrived at the standard of exatness which grammar has won in presenting linguistic competence (Widdowson, 1979, p. 13 as cited in Thomas, 1983, p. 97). Furthermore, pragmatics is a precarious field and after what precedent it can be taught is not promptly obvious (p. 97). To this extent, the farther imperative …show more content…

The antagonists believe that “competence, whether linguistic or pragmatic, is not teachable” (Kasper, 1997, p. 1). They believe that competence should be in possession, progressed, mastered, employed or mislayed by learners at most. They also hold that English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes should not expound the culture of English-speaking countries considering English belongs to Britain, Australia and North America. This because these countries are exercising hegemony and linguistic imperialism (Cutting, 2008, p. 73). Additionally, the opposition concluded that since most learners of English, especially from the outer circle, will not practice English on a daily basis and will use it for the most part with other NNSs, it is not confirmed which pragmatic system is to work for as a model. The other issue on the other side’s ground is most teachers of EFL are NNSs and for this reason do not retain the NSs instinct to bring into play the correspondent approaches and materials. More than that, they are not so sure whether instruction in language use will be in effect in establishing learners’ pragmatic competence (Rose, 1994, p. …show more content…

They consider knowledge of the L2 culture prerequisite assuming that the learners desire to grasp the understated message in the L2. The partisans of intercultural approach presumed that L2 culture will support learners as well to analyse the aspects in which their L1 works (Cutting, 2008, p. 73). It is unquestionable that “learners in a second-language environment develop a certain degree of pragmatic awareness about the second language even without specific instruction, but building on this awareness through instruction would likely help learners increase their productive abilities in L2 pragmatics” (Bardovi-Harlig & Griffin, 2005, p. 413). In like manner, Wildner-Basset and Tateyama et. al (1990 as cited in Kasper, 1997, p. 9) proved that “pragmatic routines are teachable to beginning foreign language learners” (p. 9). This result is significant for it drives away the statement that pragmatics can only be given lessons after students have ripened a decent grammar and vocabulary competence (Kasper, 1997, p.

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