Alicia Martínez-Flor

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.

Film-based dialogues have been praised in the current work on pragmatics as a potentially useful source that can enhance learners’ (meta)pragmatic awareness of the pragmatic phenomena in actual communicative events. Following this view, this paper first outlines the concept of (meta)pragmatic awareness and explains, drawing on McConachy and Spencer-Oatey (2020), the different theoretical perspectives examining the role that awareness plays in developing learners’ pragmatic ability.

Nowadays, English has been adopted as an international language that speakers from distinct linguacultural backgrounds use to achieve any communicative goal. An important part of this communicative process is undoubtedly the mastery of pragmatic competence. More specifically, second language pragmatics needs to respond to the challenges of globalization. To that end, it is essential that teachers become aware of the importance of developing their learners’ pragmatic competence so that they can successfully communicate in diverse English as an international language interactions.

Speech acts are one of the most widely examined pragmatic features that second and foreign language (L2/FL) learners need to master in order to communicate appropriately in the target language. Without a proper knowledge of how to use and understand a particular speech act that is appropriate to the contextual and cultural parameters of a specific situation, L2/FL learners may run the risk of being perceived as rude and/or impolite.

Speech acts are an important and integral part of day-to-day life in all languages. In language acquisition, the need to teach speech acts in a target language has been demonstrated in studies conducted in the field of interlanguage pragmatics which indicate that the performance of speech acts may differ considerably from culture to culture, thus creating communication difficulties in cross-cultural encounters.

Only a few empirical studies have explored Focus on Form in the pragmatic realm. By operationalising this theoretical construct for an implicit condition, this study examined the effects of two types of pragmatic instruction (explicit and implicit) on learning head acts and downgraders in suggestions. Eighty-one Spanish learners of English took one of the three sections of a computer science class for a 16-week university semester.

Current Trends in the Development and Teaching of the four Language Skills builds connections from theory in the four language skills to instructional practices. It comprises twenty-one chapters that are grouped in five sections. The first section includes an introductory chapter which presents a communicative competence framework developed by the editors in order to highlight the key role the four skills play in language learning and teaching.