Pragmatics in teacher education for nonnative‐speaking teachers: A consciousness‐raising approach

Despite a heavy emphasis on pragmatics since the advent of communicative language teaching some 20 years ago, trainers of nonnative‐speaking (NNS) language teachers who wish to incorporate pragmatics in their teacher training programmes still find little practical help from existing research. While research in pragmatics offers a number of potential candidates for the construction of theoretical frameworks for language use and the definition of core concepts such as pragmatic competence, we still lack a coherent theory of language use and a comprehensive and reliable account of what constitutes pragmatic competence. The result of this is that the prevailing approach to developing pragmatic competence in the classroom is based largely on native‐speaker (NS) intuitions concerning their own language use. Given this state of affairs, of particular interest in the teaching of language use is the education of NNS teachers. This paper reviews some of the problems relevant to the teaching of language use and discusses pragmatic consciousness‐raising (FCR) as one alternative in teacher education for dealing with pragmatics in the classroom.