The Effect of Explicit Teaching of Pragmatics on the Development of PragmaticCompetence in a Group of Saudi Female Learners of English:Towards a Pragmatics Skill in EFL

Abstract

The present research emanates from classroom observations of common pragmatic failures in
EFL contexts in different teaching programs where learners of English are native speakers of
Arabic. The body of research in the field of pragmatics and in the subfield of pragmatic
instruction suggests that one possible solution to the pragmatic failure problem would be the
raising of consciousness/awareness explicitly as per the noticing hypothesis (Schmidt, 1993). We
pretend that one way of ensuring the acquisition of an L2 sociolinguistic and sociocultural
awareness is the explicit teaching of pragmatics as a skill and a theory, thus allowing learners to
theorize about language – pragmatic theory here – in the sense of Gopnik and Meltzoff (1997).
Convinced that the development of pragmatic competence will not only remediate for the
pragmatic failure but also facilitate an efficient and faster learning of L2, we undertook, in the
present project, to measure the effect of the teaching of pragmatics on the acquisition of English
L2 pragmatic competence in an Arabic L1 EFL context. The testing is made through the
acquisition of English pragmatics of the act of request in an experimental quantitative approach.
The present research also proposes a method of teaching pragmatics as an explicit skill early
enough in the EFL context program and in a social interactionist approach to the EFL
classroom. We believe that, considering the distance between L1 culture and L2 culture, the
more distant from each other the two cultures are the more need there will be for explicit
teaching of the pragmatic behavior in L2.