Pragmatic Competence -- PRAGMATICS

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Date Posted: 12:06:38 10/03/09 Sat
Author: Maria de Lourdes
Subject: Pragmatic Competence

Dear Professor and mates,

Pragmatics is the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context. Communicative action includes not only speech acts - such requesting, greeting,etc. - but also participation in conversation, engaging in different types of discourse, and sustaining introduction in complex speech events.
Competence, whether linguistic or pragmatic, is not teachable. Competence is a type of knowledge that learners possess, develop, acquire,use or lose. The challenge for foreign or second language teaching is whether we can arrange learning opportunities in such a way that they benefit the development of pragmatic competence in L2.
Pragmatic is not subordinate to knowlegde of grammar and textual knowledge and interacts with 'organizational competence' in complex ways. In order to communicate successfully in a target language, pragmatic competence in L2 must be reasonably well developed.
If we as teachers assume that learners need explicit instruction in L2 pragmatics, our question is how to do it.
Is it the teachers responsability to teach it and, if so, what can actually be learned about speech acts in the classroom and how much time should be alloted to this effort? How high should teachers set the bar in terms of what is expected of learners in their learning and performance? How many speech acts would be selected altogether? Would teachers focus on just one at a time? How would it be determined whether to spend time on one speech act more than another? Is actual or idealized pragmatic behavior taught? Should the focus be both on speech acts delivered orally and in writing? What about the oral/written hybrid language e-mails requests? What about the option of having the learners gather information from natives speakers? And so on...

See you.
What do you think?

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Replies:

Re: Pragmatic Competence -- Flaviane, 17:33:18 10/04/09 Sun