Raising Language Learners ‘ Pragmatic Awareness and Intercultural Competence in Increasingly Multilingual Environments

Abstract: Pragmatic fluency forms crucial part of a language user‘s competence. Norms of politeness, communicative styles, scripts and preferences differ between languages and cultures in describable ways, FL realizations of pragmatic functions are often unclear to the learner where the relevant contextual factors are not self-evident, or are ignored when they inconceivably grossly differ from the L1 phenomena. Even positive L1 transfer is not activated if the learner has not been trained, whereas handling pragmatic and discourse features of the TL in the classroom is conducive to increased operationality in the use thereof. A promising perspective for successful intercultural and pragmatic training is the Interface Model, which proceeds from an explication of how relevant principles operate in the learners ‘ L1 (culture) through an explanation of pertinent L2 norms and subsequent modification of the L1 principle to accommodate L2 data, to practice first expecting the learner to apply the appropriate FL strategies and speech acts against an L1 (!) context. By such a gradual, multi-stage method the learner becomes ‗pragmatically fluent ‘ before commencing to use the operational principles in the TL itself. The juxtaposition and use of L1 and L2 principles alongside lead to successful automatization and internalization of the material and the development of pragmatic multicompetence – L2 users differ significantly in their employment of pragmalinguistic strategies from monolingual speakers of either language, transferring similar speech acts back and forth between the tongues in their command. The Interface Model enables them to transfer those patterns of interactional behavior which will be appropriate