Abstract:

The purpose of this presentation is to share how to help world language teachers find an effective teaching practice in explicit instruction of intercultural pragmatics and how to push students to a higher level of pragmatic competence and successful solving of real-life related problems in a second language (SL) context. The presentation will highlight the teaching of pragmatics using cross-cultural activities.

The problem is that learners of Foreign Language (FL) lack cultural appropriateness in cross-cultural situations. Many FL teachers were mainly focused on teaching FL vocabulary and FL grammar rules and concepts, and the old way of teaching FL.

From the teacher's perspective, the new way of introducing and demystifying "reading between the lines," pragmatic transfer from the native language (L1) to a target language (TL), understanding speakers' tone, irony, metaphors, and many other concepts would help learners to successfully communicate without appearing rude, arrogant, or even unfriendly and offensive to the native speakers of that FL and culture. FL learners who learn about pragmatics will need explicit instruction to help them develop the capacity to identify specific implicatures within cultural pragmatics. If the teachers do not provide learners with a solid basis of metalinguistic vocabulary through explicit instruction, the learners will not be able to build more sophisticated pragmatic awareness.

The current researchers conducted on teaching pragmatics with explicit instruction in the foreign language classroom, especially with adult learners, suggested that there was not just an effective but significant difference in learners' performance after receiving this type of training.

Keywords:

Explicit instruction, communicative competence, intercultural pragmatics, foreign language teaching.