A Study on Enhancement of Language Competence Through Pragmatic Practices

Abstract

English is unquestionably an international tongue, and it is now more significant than ever due to its widespread use. Students must communicate in English both for academic and professional purposes. To meet the diverse learning demands of Indian students from various age groups, social backgrounds, and cultural backgrounds, a variety of teaching strategies are observed and used. The Grammar Translation method, used up until the 1970s, was teaching linguistic forms and structures with the goal of enhancing grammatical proficiency through memorization of rules, to comprehend the syntax of the second language. However, it disregards the significance of linguistic and socio-cultural factors. Direct utterances hardly ever have room for concealed or suggested meanings when learning linguistic competence, like grammar. However, in normal conversation, speakers typically convey the majority of communicational material through inference rather than explicit language. Having a conversation without using implicit meaning is actually impossible. As a result, it is important to examine an utterance's pragmatic potential or any context-specific latent meanings. In other words, pragmatics is the study of communicative behavior in a socio-cultural context since every utterance is not isolated and has socio-cultural implications based on the goal and manner of speaking. Conversation, debate, and many forms of discourses are examples of communication actions whereas speech acts are requesting, addressing, inviting, apologizing etc. This paper focuses on students’ self-learning abilities and various methods that enhance their pragma-linguistics.