EVALUATION OF ESL SENIOR SECONDARY SCHOOL CURRICULUM IN NIGERIA: A SOCIOCULTURAL PEDAGOGICAL APPROACH IN ENHANCING PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE

English language teaching is incomplete without a maximum focus on how the L2 learners use the language they learn with utmost appropriateness according to contexts during conversations. In an increasingly volatile world, appropriate language use is a vital tool to reducing interpersonal clashes, and ensuring peaceful co-existence. For the L2 learners to master this appropriate language use, their pragmatic competence in the language has to be developed. The role of classroom instruction in the development of this competence has been widely acknowledged. Thus, any curriculum that does not make adequate provision for this instruction is doing a colossal disservice to the L2 learners. This paper has concertedly made efforts to raise awareness on the need for curriculum developers in Nigeria to clearly give policy direction on teaching of pragmatics, at least beginning from the senior secondary classes. Also, the paper provides a conceptual strategy (Transactional Classroom Meeting) that is wholly interwoven with the sociocultural constructs of mediation, scaffolding and zone of proximal development ZPD, on how teachers can teach pragmatics in ESL classrooms. It is confidently perceived that this strategy would elicit the necessary social interactions that would enable the L2 learners to internalize the pragmatic principles in order to enhance their pragmatic competence. Future researchers can leverage on this by carrying out empirical studies to find out the definite impact of this strategy. Article visualizations