Exploring the meta-pragmatic realm in English language teaching

As the speakership of English worldwide continues to grow, English language teachers are required to devise ways to prepare their learners for communicating successfully across cultures. As pragmatics is particularly tied up with culture, the ways in which individuals from different cultures will orient to pragmatic phenomena in their interaction are largely dependent on the background cultural knowledge and assumptions which they bring to the interaction and how they choose to position themselves. In the teaching of pragmatics of English, thus there are clear limitations to a ‘knowledge transmission’ orientation to teaching. This paper argues for the need to teach for meta-pragmatic awareness as situated within an intercultural perspective on language teaching and learning. Data is presented to illuminate the concept of meta-pragmatic awareness, accompanied by discussion of how such awareness could be developed in the language classroom