Learning how to Mitigate Requests through an Explicit Pragmatics-Based Method.

Abstract

It is widely agreed that the goal of language teaching is to develop learners’ communicative competence (Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor, 2006). Consequently, instructional practices should focus not just on the knowledge of the grammatical and lexical system of that target language, but also on the “secret rules” underlying it (Bardovi-Harlig, 2001). These “secret rules” are related to one of the essential components of the construct of communicative competence, that is the pragmatic competence. Scholars in the research field of interlanguage pragmatics have reported the benefits of adopting an explicit teaching approach on developing pragmatics (Kasper and Roever, 2005) and, therefore, have highlighted the necessity to design new instructional approaches to explicitly teach learners a variety of pragmatic features (Rose, 2005). Thus, the objective of this paper is to contribute to this line of research by presenting a pragmatics-based explicit method designed to develop learners’ pragmatic ability in the appropriate use of request mitigating devices.