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Title: Raising EFL students’ awareness of pragmatic conventions in forming intercultural competence

 

Vol. 2, 2017, pp. 169-183.

DOI: 10.46687/SILC.2017.v02.014

 

Author: İsmail Erton

About the author: Department of Translation and Interpretation, Atılım University, Ankara, Turkey

e-mail: ismail.erton@atilim.edu.tr

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7057-6924

 

Citation (APA style): Erton, İ. (2017). Raising EFL students’ awareness of pragmatic conventions in forming intercultural competence. Studies in Linguistics, Culture, and FLT, 2, 169-183. doi: 10.46687/SILC.2017.v02.014

 

Link: https://silc.fhn-shu.com/images/issues/2017/SILC_2017_2_169_183_15_EN.pdf

 

Abstract: For almost half a century, teaching and learning a language and even the linguistic studies related to them were elaborated in a structural framework. Both the focus on teaching/learning methods and the linguistic corpus offered within such curricula were far from that of developing EFL students’ cross-cultural interactions. This paper suggests that the implementation of a pedagogy of pragmatics in foreign language instruction facilitates the development of intercultural competence and activates the cross-cultural schemata of the learners. The pragmatically-oriented social behavior which embodies political, sociocultural and economic conventions can be integrated into the EFL curriculum via translation, literary studies and digital multimedia technology. It is shown that, by forming intercultural competence, language learners can feel more secure in communicative practices within various sociocultural contexts and, thus, the significance of teaching and learning pragmatic knowledge to master the skills in a foreign language should be emphasized as not only a fundamental principle in linguistic practices, but also as an ultimate goal in EFL instruction.

Key words: Linguistics, pragmatics, pragmatic competence, intercultural competence, foreign language teaching, foreign language learning, curriculum, communication, schemata  

 

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