Abstract:
Learning a new language is a daunting process as it involves continuous learning of new sounds, many unfamiliar words and various grammar rules. In addition to this, one of the major difficulties that stand in the way of a learner is the social use of language in other words pragmatics rules. Pragmatics encompasses a lot of aspects including speech acts, conversational structure, conversational implicature, discourse analysis, and sociolinguistic aspects of language use such as choice of address forms in EFL studies and teaching. These areas of language and language use have not traditionally been addressed in language teaching process, though they have been the focus of extensive research in linguistics. This paper discusses how teaching pragmatic competence could be approached in the English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom. The paper states that teaching pragmatics aims to facilitate learners’ sense of being able to find socially appropriate language for the situations that they encounter in real life.
