Pragmatic linguistics and its impact on language education

Abstract

Pragmatics is a discipline, in linguistics, which deals with language in use. It makes it its object of study based on its communicative function.

It is for this reason that this current is interested in examining all the behaviors and linguistic uses of speakers of a language in a given society.

This examination aims to identify the laws that govern this behavior.

Pragmatics differs from the structuralist movement, due to the fact that the latter studies linguistic structures and forms by abstracting from their uses and outside of their contexts; which, in the opinion of many theorists, has limited linguistic study in are confined within a purely formal and restrictive framework.

 The results of pragmatic studies have been the subject of applications in different fields. The most important is language teaching with the emergence of a so-called communicative approach which considers the learner as the main axis of the learning process. Whereas previously the interest was centered on the subject taught.

The main goal of this approach is to help learners acquire communication skills that allow them to use linguistic knowledge in different situations in a given society.

In this it differs from the structural approach which placed much greater emphasis on structural exercises.

This approach allowed the acquisition of the language, but did not provide access to its use in an interactive situation. Also the learner did not have the ability to use what he had learned as a means of communication in specific circumstances.