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Carlota was having a party and was very excited to invite her friends she had met while studying abroad. It was her birthday and she couldn’t wait to celebrate. She knew she’d see a bunch of people in class so decided to invite them then. She started with her friend Aliana and asked her to the party. Aliana gave a vague refusal and Carlota didn’t feel like insisting so just let it be, a little disappointed. Aliana also seemed to react strangely. Nothing huge, just enough to give Carlota pause.  Then, it happened again, this time with her friend Luis. This time it made Carlota stop to think. Why did they not want to come? She didn’t want to be pushy or insist, but… it was at that moment she remembered other invitations she had heard and it dawned on her.  Of course, insistence was part of the invitation!  She needed to convey the sincerity in her message and be sure to insist they come, even if they refused the first time. Carlota’s experience is not uncommon. Often the right words and structures in the wrong sequence cause miscommunication or do not convey the intended meaning (i.e., illocutionary force). 

With explicit attention on this communication and interpretation of meaning, or pragmatics, learners become equipped to use the language structures they know in the most appropriate way. A critical component of intercultural communicative competence, pragmatics is at the heart of language and should be a fundamental component of the world language classroom. While this can be a daunting task, it doesn’t have to be. This month’s InterCom will explore various ways in which pragmatics can be integrated daily in world language classrooms. This includes a look at what to do if you feel like you are missing pragmatic knowledge, a model for assessing pragmatics, and learner subjectivity. Here are a few tips to get us started.

1 – Start early: Novice learners are equipped to explore pragmatic features of language in their dominant language(s) and the language(s) they are learning. This can start as early as greeting and leave taking sequences. For more on teaching novices, see this short article and this activity. 

2 – Include often: To make pragmatic instruction meaningful, it should be integrated throughout the course, not relegated to special “cultural moments” or isolated incidents. This means testing and assessment in addition to classroom activities. Here are some ideas for classroom activities, and here are some assessment options. 

3 – Investigate thoroughly: The dynamic nature of language and individual personalities make isolating patterns and learning objectives challenging. Asking learners to investigate possible patterns is one way to manage this variety while also making key components salient for the learner. In the example above, this might include a journal where they record the number of insistence sequences in an invitation and then compare their answers. Here is some guidance for student data collection, along with an example of what this might look like in practice.