RAISING EFL STUDENTS’ AWARENESS OF PRAGMATIC CONVENTIONS IN FORMING INTERCULTURAL COMPETENCE

Abstract

For almost half a century, teaching and learning a language and even the linguistic studies related to them were elaborated in a structural framework. Both the focus on teaching/learning methods and the linguistic corpus offered within such curricula were far from that of developing EFL students’ cross-cultural interactions. This paper suggests that the implementation of a pedagogy of pragmatics in foreign language instruction facilitates the development of intercultural competence and activates the cross-cultural schemata of the learners. The pragmatically-oriented social behavior which embodies political, sociocultural and economic conventions can be integrated into the EFL curriculum via translation, literary studies and digital multimedia technology. It is shown that, by forming intercultural competence, language learners can feel more secure in communicative practices within various sociocultural contexts and, thus, the significance of teaching and learning pragmatic knowledge to master the skills in a foreign language should be emphasized as not only a fundamental principle in linguistic practices, but also as an ultimate goal in EFL instruction.

Keywords

• linguistics
• pragmatics
• pragmatic competence
• intercultural competence
• foreign language teaching
• foreign language learning
• curriculum
• communication
• schemata