Learners’ Developing Pragmatic Competence As A Common Ground For Intercultural Communication

Résumé: Communicative competence (CC), as it was operationalized for language teaching in the 1980s, had for long been the ultimate goal for foreign language learning, taking the native speaker as a model. With more and more frequent intercultural encounters using English as a medium of communication and with research findings showing that nativelike competence is unachievable especially for adult EFL learners, the ‘intercultural speaker’, the term used to refer to interculturally competent users of the target language (TL), is suggested as an alternative to the native-like speaker as a model. However, given that language cannot be stripped of its sociocultural aspects, the present state-of-the-art article argues that the pragmatic aspects of the TL already being acquired, i.e. learners’ pragmatic interlanguage, can be a common ground upon which interlocutors from linguistically and culturally different backgrounds rely in their interactional exchanges provided that they are aware of cultural differences and equipped with such attitudes as curiosity, empathy, openness and ambiguity tolerance which are necessary for successful intercultural communication.

Publié dans la revue: افاق للعلوم