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Instrumentalities - learners have to be aware of the differences between written and spoken English which affect our language in several ways. Spoken communication usually requires fast, immediate production and understanding. On the other hand, when we write, we usually have time to revise, check and rewrite what we have written. Similarly, the addressee can read, reread and discuss the piece of writing he or she receives. In spontaneous speech we have very little or no time to prepare what we are going to say. Our speech is often filled with silent pauses, voiced-filled pauses (erm), repetitions, false starts. We use discourse markers – small words or fixed phrases that indicate our involvement in the conversation and how we want it to continue. Contractions are used instead of full forms in order to make the conversation more natural. There are also phenomena such as the dialect, accent or other variety of English that learners should be aware of, but it is not very likely that learners will be able to imitate these.
Knowledge of norms of interpretation and interaction, especially turn-taking signals an already existing very good command of language. This can only be achieved by careful and consistent training and it also requires certain intrinsic personal qualities for such skill to be developed.
Context is also determined by different genres – categories such as anecdotes, presentations and other public speeches, commercials, newspaper articles, poems, riddles etc. In the language classroom students should be able to distinguish various genres by being exposed to as many of them as possible.
All the previously mentioned features of interaction should be taken into consideration in the classroom environment as well as they are present in everyday L1 communication.
Summary to Chapter I
Even if members of a community which speaks the same language communicate a message, it may be interpreted according to different interpretive conventions. In social interaction, how an utterance is said is more important than what is said. The utterances people exchange is related to the situational and cultural context in which they occur. There is certain verbal, paraverbal (stress, intonation, tempo, laughter) and non-verbal signs (gaze direction, gesture, body posture, tone of voice) that help to interpret the utterances. Gumperz calls them “contextualization cues” (see Kramsh, 2018:27).
The situation becomes even more complicated when speakers have to face different cultural tendencies. For an English language learner, learning how to interpret and use contextualization cues is extremely difficult. Gumperz (2016:383) explains the reason why they are difficult to learn: “because of the complexity of the referential processes involved and their inherent ambiguity, contextualization cues are not readily learned, and certainly not through direct instruction, so that …second language speakers may have good functional control of the grammar and lexicon of their new language but may contextualize their talk by relying on the rhetorical strategies of their first language. Contextualization conventions are required through primary socialization in family or friendship circles or intensive communicative co-operation in a finite range of institutionalized environments.” (see Kasper & Rose, 2001: 82)
According to Bachman (1990:87), language competence includes two core components, “organizational competence” and “pragmatic competence.” The former refers to grammatical competence and textual competence. The latter one consists of “illocutionary competence” and “social linguistic competence.” Illocutionary competence refers to knowledge of communicative actions and how to perform these actions. Social linguistic competence means the ability to use language appropriately according to the situation.
Mastering a language does not only mean acquiring great linguistic competence with focus on accuracy and form, but it also includes developing pragmatic competence to avoid inappropriate usage of a language in the form of a social and cultural misunderstanding. Pragmatic failure is far more serious than a failure caused by, for instance, using a wrong tense. Grammatical errors may imply that a speaker is a less proficient language user but pragmatic failures might have profound impact on the speaker as a person.
Assuming teachers do not wish their students to appear impolite, uncaring or unfriendly, pragmatic instruction has to become an integral part of the lessons. In the classroom students should learn to interpret language in the same way they have learnt to interpret the rules of their mother tongue.
As Kasper and Rose (2001:5) state “The main categories of communicative acts – in Searle’s (2016) influential classification, representatives, directives, commissive, expressive, and declarations – are available in any community, as are (according to current evidence) such individual communicative acts as greetings, leave-takings, requests, offers, suggestions, invitations, refusals, apologies, complaints, or expressions of gratitude.
The major realization strategies identified for some communicative acts have been found stable across ethnolinguistically distant speech communities.”
Sometimes second language learners as well as native speakers tend to underestimate pragmatic learning. To reveal the rules of human communication, pedagogic intervention is necessary “not with the purpose of providing learners with new information but to make them aware of what they know already and encourage them to use their universal or transferable (L1) pragmatic knowledge in language two (L2) contexts” (Kasper & Rose, 2001:6).
At the same time, we have to consider the existence of certain culturally specific expressions which vary from culture to culture and also certain communicative acts which are known in some cultures but unknown in others. Then sufficient instructional intervention can be recommended or even become inevitable in order not to violate the politeness principle applied to the specific culture.
Foreign language learners are restricted to the classroom with limited input and occasion for practice. In order to learn to communicate in an appropriate manner, learners have to be able to distinguish different speech styles and the social meaning associated with a particular speech style. They need to know what their social role is in a given speech event and what the social expectations of such a role are in a given society. It is necessary to instruct students to pay attention to the occurrence of contextualization cues in order to recognize the relationship between linguistic form and its social interpretation. Presumably, it is easier to decipher contextualization conventions when learners can rely on positive transfer from their mother tongue.
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