THE IMPORTANCE OF INTERCULTURAL PRAGMATICS IN TEACHING A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

This article focuses on the role of intercultural pragmatics in modern foreign languages teaching and, on the notion, issues of intercultural pragmatics. It also analyses the importance of intercultural communication in the teaching of foreign languages, pragmatic aspects of intercultural communication, the interdependence of linguistic and cultural phenomena. While pragmatics is a branch of linguistics, intercultural pragmatism is developing as a new supplement to pragmatics. The process of intercultural communication includes linguistic and socio-cultural elements. The importance of intercultural communication in the study of a foreign language is that it eliminates cultural misunderstandings, mistrust and helps to adapt to other civilizational traditions of intercultural communication. Nowadays, according to communicative language teaching the main focus is on the development of communicative competence in foreign languages teaching. Sociolinguistic and pragmatic competencies are the integral aspects of this competence. Cultural and social factors are important in developing intercultural communicative competences in order to avoid difficulties that may arise in understanding interlocutors of different cultural backgrounds. Knowledge of the components of a language and cultural foundations such as phraseological units, words and proverbs help to overcome difficulties in intercultural communication and lead not only to understanding of “foreign” culture through “own” culture, but also the pragmatic factors that arise in this case. Given that English is the lingua franca in the world, there are many problems with intercultural pragmatics in the process of communication in this language. Therefore, it is necessary to pay attention to the development of intercultural communication competence in the process of teaching English. However, there are a number of problems in the process of teaching a foreign language. The problem can be divided into linguistic, lingua-didactic and methodological aspects.

Current Issues in Intercultural Pragmatics Istvan Kecskes and Stavros Assimakopoulos (Eds.) John Benjamins Publishing Company (2017)

Current Issues in Intercultural Pragmatics Istvan Kecskes and Stavros Assimakopoulos (Eds.) John Benjamins Publishing Company (2017)

Metapragmatic comments on relating across cultures

This paper analyses postings made by student applicants on Korean online communities about how best to handle interactions with potential future PhD supervisors at UK universities. The questions they posed reveal the lack of relevant contextual information they experienced, especially around the rights and obligations of supervisors. This paper thus analyses students’ metapragmatic comments and argues for greater attention to be paid within interpersonal and intercultural pragmatics to interactional goals and conceptions of role relations, especially the rights and obligations associated with them. The analysis has revealed that background information on role relations is of great importance for relational management and communication planning in high stakes intercultural interaction. This suggests that potential cultural variation in the perceived rights and obligations associated with a given role (in this case, PhD supervisor) and their implications for assessments of role relations are of central concern.

Intercultural pragmatics in the Global Englishes context: Some implications for developing intercultural communicative competence

The prevalent use of English as a lingua franca raises questions about the consequences for the practice of English Language Teaching. This paper investigates some of the pedagogical implications from the perspective of intercultural pragmatics. I argue that developing politeness strategies is an important aspect of enhancing learners’ intercultural communicative competence. This is illustrated with the examples of speech acts such as requests, conditional threats and conditional promises. I draw attention to some fundamental misconceptions that may arise from an inadequate interpretation of cross-cultural findings, and argue that in order to establish which politeness strategies to use in the context of global communication, the focus of intercultural investigations needs to be shifted from studying lingua-cultural differences to studying lingua-cultural similarities.