Pragmatic Awareness in Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

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 com- municative situations and on the part of members of specific speech communities. Following an educational perspective, we deal with prag- matic awareness in relation to the construct of communicative compe- tence, and we consider research on the role of awareness in pragmatic learning. First, pragmatic competence is introduced as part of the over- all framework of communication. Second, we raise the need to focus on pragmatics including pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aware- ness. Third, a review on research dealing with learners’ pragmatic awareness is provided. Finally, some future directions deriving from the previous subsections are briefly mentioned. EARLY