The place of pragmatic competence within the field of foreign language teaching

Providing a broad and detailed definition of pragmatic competence can be a challenging task, mainly due to an interdisciplinary character of pragmatics itself. This article discusses the main characteristics of pragmatic competence and aims at providing a detailed description of how it was perceived by linguist since it was first described. The approaches to foreign language teaching as well as the notion of fluency have transformed throughout the years and so has our perception of pragmatic competence. Rapidly growing popularity of mobile technologies, common access to information as well as the forming of a multi-cultural society make foreign language teaching face new challenges and opportunities. The article focuses on the place pragmatic competence takes in a modern-day language teaching and argues its importance in intercultural communication and achieving proficiency in foreign language