Language Competence In Communication

In order to communicate properly, English language learners must develop a number of language competencies. Since language is the medium by which people express their experiences and their ideas of the world in which they live, it carries within it cultural and functional meanings. For example, a clothing shop with a sign in the window stating, "Baby Sale- This Week Only!" Because of our pragmatics competence we know that the items for babies are on the sale not the babies themselves. Crystal (1985, p.240) defines pragmatics competence as

"The study of the language from the point view of users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects their use of language

Ali and Hani ask a native speaker to lend them his dictionary. Ali says "borrow your dictionary"; while Hani asks" Could I borrow your dictionary please?" Bothe requests are obvious. Yet the native speaker would response to Hani request because it is more appropriate. The inappropriate expressions or inaccurate interpretations are results of pragmatics incompetence which can lead to miscommunication and misunderstanding, or what Thomas (1983) called pragmatics failure. Consequently, teachers should not view pragmatics as a minor unite that can be added on if time and student interest allow. However, pragmatics learning should be regarded as a necessity. Our students suffer from the problem of transfer which means they are unable to transfer what they have learned in the classroom to their daily life contexts. The major reasons of this phenomena is teacher 's concentration on motor perspective skills (receive, memorize, and recall) instead of focusing on interactive

As Olshtain and Cohen et al (1991) stated that using the role plays, drama, and mini dialogue in which learners have some choice of what they say provides students with opportunities to practice and develop a wide range of pragmatic abilities. According to Fujinmori (2004) acts, such as requests, refusal, and compliment, have been identified as problematic for EFL/ESL learners at al level. Thus, as a teacher I focus of communicative activities particularly role play. Moreover, video is one of the richest resources to help learners to observe and experience pragmatics. Also, television shows and movies are excellent resources for analyzing language use in specific contexts and observing the proper employment of speech acts. Therefore, competent teacher can use a short movie and give learners a list of questions to answer after watching the movie, for example, How did Jane apologize to her mother. One of the best ways that can help students in improving their pragmatics is to invite native speaking guests to class to interact with students. Second, teachers should not see classroom management and language used in the daily classroom management as outside of the English lesson, and may choose to conduct classroom management as outside of the English lesson, and may