In recent years, the areas of intercultural pragmatics and transcultural pragmatics under the phenomenon of “interculturality” have been investigated by linguists and language scholars because interculturality has a deep-rooted connection with the language and second language teaching and learning. This data-oriented study follows a quantitative research design. The data is collected through a survey questionnaire from 75 English teachers who are teaching at the university level in five different public and private sector universities in Pakistan. The overall results encourage embedding the knowledge of interculturality in ESL/EFL classes. There is a need to organize training sessions for teachers because many teachers reported that they do not utilize such skills in their ESL/EFL classrooms. In addition, the majority of teachers also believed in employing new approaches for teaching transcultural pragmatics to their students. This study further highlights that teacher/educators could also benefit from working together to develop the teaching of interculturality and transcultural competence, and to make this development happen in relation to teacher professional development.
In Pragmatics, scholars have given special attention to study the influence of leaners culture and social rules in understanding and using target language pragmatics. For this purpose, speech acts have been studied quite widely. This study investigates the speech act of responding to apology in Pakistani English, British English and Pakistani Urdu, and tries to highlight whether respondents transfer their cultural and social rules in the target language or not. The present study followed quantitative approach for data collection and analysis. A discourse completion test (DCT), consists of 12 apology response scenarios is used for data collection. The findings illustrate that English-using Pakistanis pragmatic choices are clearly influenced by their perceptions of various sociocultural and contextual variables. The English-using Pakistanis and Pakistani Urdu speakers are found using two main strategies (Acceptance, and Acknowledgment). In contrast, British English speakers tend to use Acceptance and Evasion strategies more often. Further, the findings have indicated that English-using Pakistanis and Pakistani Urdu speakers have used more Rejection strategies than their British English counterparts, though such communicative features are not salient in their ARs, and Pakistanis are surprisingly found quite clear and direct. The findings of the study may be helpful to English teachers who should be made aware that L2 learners’ pragmatic transfer is influenced by learners’ culture and social rules, and, as a result, should not be treated simply as a pragmatic ‘error’ or ‘failure’ to be corrected and criticized.
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