The importance of clt in the pragmatic development of language learners

Some useful activities to teach pragmatics explicitly

Even though there is no one ideal approach which is guaranteed the effect in pragmatics, but there are certain activities to utilize during English classes.

“The idea that the development of communicative competence should be an immediate and central goal of language pedagogy caught on quickly. But instruction intended to develop communicative competence in the target language will be useful only to the extent that teachers alert their students to the need to adapt their communication strategies to the new culture. When teachers fail to do this - when they fail to provide an authentic cultural context within which the meaning of what is said and done in the classroom can be interpreted "the goal of communicative competence is an illusion." In short, this focus on L2 social rules required by adopting communicative competence as the primary objective of language learning "puts a tremendous burden on the teacher who must become an anthropologist of sorts, discovering and interpreting cultural behavior for which there are no explicit rules" [7, 25].

Thus, to ‘provide language learners with authentic cultural context” in communicative language teaching pair and group work requiring negotiation and cooperation between learners, fluency-based activities that encourage learners to develop their confidence, role-plays in which students practice and develop language functions, as well as judicious use of grammar and pronunciation focused activities can often be observed. The peculiarities of CLT activities are based on fluency and accuracy and related with real world situations or authentic sources. These activities are fulfilled in meaningful, mechanical or in communicative practices. In these kind of practices the used activities differ from each other. “Pragmalinguistic failure happens when the meaning of the language learner’s utterance is different from that most frequently used by native speakers or when speech act strategies are inappropriately transferred from an L1 to an L2”. Thus in order to avoid from this failure teachers should only be in pursuit of different situations or context where learners have to use appropriate utterences.