Pragmatic Awareness in Second Language Acquisition
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PRAGMATIC AWARENESS IN SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
INTRODUCTION
Pragmatic awareness is the conscious, reflective, explicit knowledge about pragmatics. It thus involves knowledge of those rules and conventions underlying appropriate language use in particular communicative situations and on the part of members of specific speech communities. Following an educational perspective, we deal with pragmatic awareness in relation to the construct of communicative competence, and we consider research on the role of awareness in pragmatic learning. First, pragmatic competence is introduced as part of the overall framework of communication. Second, we raise the need to focus on pragmatics including pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic awareness. Third, a review on research dealing with learners’ pragmatic awareness is provided. Finally, some future directions deriving from the previous subsections are briefly mentioned. E A R LY D E V E L O P M E N T S
The notion of communicative competence originated from those criticisms raised by the Chomskyan notion of linguistic competence (1965). Scholars of different fields, namely those of linguistics, psychology, sociology and anthropology, argued against the absence of aspects related to language use in the concept of linguistic competence, as it merely accounted for an ideal grammatical knowledge shared by native speakers of a given language. Hymes (1972) first suggested the substitution of Chomsky’s linguistic competence into a wider concept, that of communicative competence, which would also include social and referential aspects of the language. Nevertheless, the term communicative competence may involve much more than the mere extension of linguistic competence. According to Cenoz (1996), it also implies a qualitative change and a distinct approach to the study of language use, since communicative competence is a dynamic concept that depends on the interlocutors’ negotiation of meaning. The construct of communicative competence has been particularly influential in the field of language learning as it bears a direct relationship with the communicative approach to language teaching. For this J. Cenoz and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 6: Knowledge about Language, 193–204. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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reason, different scholars in the field of applied linguistics have attempted to describe that construct by identifying various components that would constitute a whole model for the study of learners’ communicative competence. One of the most representative and significant models that have arisen within the field of applied linguistics is that of Bachman (1990) as it was the first explicitly identified pragmatics as one of the two major components of communicative competence. Bachman (1990) distinguishes between organisational and pragmatic competence. On the one hand, organisational competence refers to those abilities taking part in the production and identification of gr
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