Pragmatics in the Classroom (Published)
Structured and systematic study of pragmatics in linguistics has assumed a central dimension since the middle of the century to meet the new vistas opened up for investigation in the field. Pragmatics as language in use views its study from the context-based perspective by real people in real situations, whether spoken or written within a political, social, cultural or religious melieu. But poor pragmatic knowledge, as often observed in ESL learners in discursive events has been unequivocally been devastating as, for example, when such errors are seen as insult on the participant, not grammatical resulting from the learning process. This paper aims at lucidly elucidating the need for pragmatic instructions in the classroom. It also examines pragmatics in actual language use by exemplifying with scalar implicature and the cooperative principles whose firm knowledge all over the world has enhanced communicative events as reality.
Keywords: Conversation, Cooperative Principles, Pragmatics, scalar implicature