This thorough analysis of the literature reviewed on pragmatics provides a practical and knowledge-based guide to EFL/ ESL teachers with the aim to assist them when they deal with the teaching and testing of pragmatics in the classroom. It also considers itself as an informational profile that might be of help whenever teacher-education and teacher-training are thought of as it reflects on an important aspect of language that seems to be overlooked in foreign language teaching/learning process and detached from real communicative language use. At first, an overview of how pragmatics is taught in the foreign/second language classroom is critically previewed so as to unfold the reality of the traditional pragmatics instruction in EFL/ESL contexts. Within this instructional perspective, an integration of the most up-to-date theoretical orientations to pragmatics instruction is shed lighted in order to better equip EFL/ESL teachers with the necessary knowledge, skills and instructional techniques and raise their awareness of pragmatics issues such as politeness, impoliteness, socio-pragmatic and pragma-linguistic failures. How to test pragmatics learning has been regarded in the second part as it deals with testing learner’s pragmatic proficiency and addresses some important practices in testing this aspect in EFL/ESL classroom as well as in examinations.
Keywords: EFL/ESL Contexts, Pragmatic Proficiency, Pragmatics, Teaching and Testing
