Teaching the pragmatics of English as an international language: A focus on pragmatic markers

Abstract

The current era of globalization and emergence of English as an international language (EIL) has brought about new opportunities for L2 pragmatic learning and teaching. The common view of pragmatic learning as an approximation to native-likeness is changing towards conceiving pragmatic ability as a tool to interact with people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the majority of whom are non-native speakers (NNSs) of English. While such reality is widely acknowledged, few attempts have been made to teach pragmatic competence in EIL. Addressing this concern, the present study investigates the effects that a pedagogical intervention on EIL pragmatics has on the oral use of pragmatic markers (PMs): a key tool for successful communication in the current increasingly multicultural and multilingual society. Seventy-three Spanish EFL students were divided into an instructional ( n = 34) and a control group ( n = 39). The instructional group received 4 interventional sessions that included (1) awareness of the legitimacy of EIL, (2) meta-pragmatic awareness of pragmatic behavior across the world, (3) task-supported instruction on PMs, and (4) strategy-based instruction. Pragmatic competence was assessed by students’ use of PMs in oral academic presentations. The results revealed that the instructional group had more significant changes in the frequency and variety of PMs used than the control one, as they widened the repertoire of PMs uttered in their academic presentations. These findings project the future of pragmatic instruction in EIL and provide directions for reorienting the EIL curriculum towards the integration of L2 pragmatics.

Advancing English as second language communication: The effectiveness of online pragmatic training on essential speech acts

“…Effective communication requires not only linguistic but also pragmatic knowledge that consists of both sociopragmatic competence, which involves a social context influencing language usage, and pragmalinguistic competence, which deals with the understanding of possible language expressions to be used for the realization of a specific speech act [ 2 ]. Educators and scholars increasingly acknowledge the use of pragmatics in teaching second and foreign languages [ 3 , 4 ]. The pragmatic ability has been employed in the field of L2 pragmatics to describe a learner's ability to understand and carry out socially and culturally relevant communication acts [ 5 ].…”