The importance of clt in the pragmatic development of language learners

THE IMPORTANCE OF CLT IN THE PRAGMATIC DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE LEARNERS

SamSIFL, Sattorova F.E.

ABSTRACT

Pragmatics has been taught implicitly through traditional methods of language teaching because there are, likely, some difficulties for language educators to define the term pragmatics, for example, as grammar. This article is devoted to show the essence of pragmatics in communicative competence. However, today language teaching requires integrating pragmatics into language classroom which creates real-life contexts to put learners’ language skills into practice. Most of the teachers do not have a clear idea of what pragmatics is and consequently, they do not take the risk to teach it in their classrooms. CLT (Communicative Language Teaching) is a one of the approaches which can suggest a good opportunity to develop learners’ pragmatic competence explicitly.

Key words: CLT, pragmatics, pragmatic competence, linguistic competence, cooperative principle, social norms

Introduction

Learning and teaching languages is not a new phenomenon in the world and people have been using different foreign languages for variable purposes throughout history such as trade, interpersonal communication, exchange of beliefs and etc.,. In the past learning languages mostly based on naturalistic way which means to acquire language via communication with native speakers. Nevertheless, in language teaching a lot of experiments have been conducted which lead to structured approaches to the presentation of the target language that are now called language methodology.

We can divide language teaching period into two large parts:

1. 
   Traditional way of language teaching (which mostly concerns about form and meaning based on translation and drill)
   
2. 
   Non-traditional way of language teaching (which has been marked by a considerable amount of creativity and energy in language teaching) [2,7]
   

What causes the changes in language teaching since 1960 which is enriched with non-traditional way of language teaching?

Before 1960 language teaching has been limited inside the classroom, in other words, teacher-led was dominant and the learners are mostly dependent on books and exercises. But later language learners and teachers realized that language acquisition is lived out in real classroom. This involves using communicative language teaching which is good opportunity to interact with learners in real life situations in order to make language learners communicative competent. It means that only linguistic competence is not enough for successful human interaction, it is useful to develop additional competencies such as sociolinguistic, pragmatic and strategic which provide both language learners and teachers with support in your growing development as a language user.

One scholar reflected on having linguistic competence in the following way “being literate on the theory of driving is not enough ….. to be a good driver one should be able to cope with driving in various real-life situations, even risky. The same in the language learning where learners are trained to be able to communicate in the target language in different situations being aware of culture, social context , etc. ” [1,29]