The instruction of pragmatics focused on the speech act of requesting to practice the written mode

Abstract

Pragmatics, considered as the study of meaning in context (Verschueren, 1999), has grown in importance in the last decades and it can be divided into into general pragmatics, sociopragmatics, and pragmalinguistics (Leech, 1983). It is believed that in order to perform a successful speech act, such notions must be considered. According to Brown and Levinson (1987), the speech act of requesting is a face-threatening act since the requester expect a benefit from the hearer of the request. Due to this characteristic, pragmatic competence is necessary for learners of a foreign language to perform successfully requests and therefore not being perceived as rude (Usó-Juan, 2010). Taking into consideration this need for pragmatic instruction on requests, the present paper intends to present a pedagogical proposal to teach the speech act of requesting to learners so that they are able to perform requests appropriately in English as a foreign language. This study attempts to provide learners with the three necessary conditions required for acquiring a second and foreign language (Kasper, 2001) while fostering the pragmatic competence of learners through awareness-raising and communicative practice activities.