Pragmatic Competence as a Communicative Competence
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possibility of making choices based on flexible strategies; c Adaptability: the ability to modulate and regulate communicative choices in relation to
communicative context; d Salience: the degree of awareness reached by communicative choices; e Indeterminacy: the possibility to re-negotiate the
pragmatic choices as the interaction unfolds in order to fulfill communicative intentions; and f Dynamicity: development of the communicative interaction in
time. On the other hand, Chomsky in Cook and Newson 2014 sees term of
pragmatic competence as the “knowledge of how language is related to the situation
in which it is used ”. He further explains that pragmatic competence places language
in the institutional setting of its use, relating the intentions and purposes to the linguistic means at hand
”. Stay in line with pragmatic study, Cook and Newson further explain that pragmatic competence also points not only knowing the
structure is matter, but also to know how to use it based on different purposes for communicating or functions, relative status between the speaker and addressee,
topic area in which participants are communicating e.g. general or informal case, business or formal, computing, medicine, etc., and situations which refer to a
physical locations e.g. in a bank, at the airport, in restaurant, at a hospital, in the court, in the office, etc. are crucial.
Eventually, pragmatic competence of students is an essential matter when we deal with classroom setting since it is the key to have effective communication.
It is common when we face a reality which gives us a sight that the most important things to be considered in EFL classroom are communicative and grammatical
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competence, meanwhile, pragmatic competence and its development are overlooked. However, to become a successful communicator, students have to
possess pragmatic competence. In summary, the figure below displays the stages of EFL students’ language competence as suggested by Gass 1997.
Figure 1. Pragmatic Competence as the Development of EFL Learners
Coming with this agenda, it is essential to develop pragmatic competence of students in EFL classroom. From the first stage of their learning, all L2 students
even at a beginner level may possess communicative competence themselves. One of the example is when they have to ask for a bag, even when they have very limited
ability in using English, they can make request by simply s ay: “Bag” while
pointing at the real bag talked. Once when their grammatical competence starts to develop with some more vocabularies are acquired, then the syntactical and lexical
choices are also developed that enable them to utter something like “Give me that
bag , please”. At this stage, we may consider that they have successfully produced
a sentence which is grammatically correct and they can communicate their intentions the way it is. Yet, on the other hand, there is something miss in their
choice of language use which tends to choose the imperative one. Wierzbicka
BASIC COMMUNICA-
TIVE INCOMPE- TENCE
communicating without grammatical
structure ENHANCED
COMMUNICA- TIVE
COMPETENCE using language
correctly according to rules and
increased grammatical
competence PRAGMATIC
COMPETENCE using language in a
socioculturally appropriate way
and increased awareness of
linguistic structures and social norms
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2003 suggests that “the imperative form is generally perceived as being even more
impolite than a swearing in English ”.
Then again, we cannot directly mention that they are being impolite. This matter may happen because of
students’ lack of pragmatic competence and pragmatic knowledge of politeness. Therefore, it is a thoughtfulness for EFL
teacher to guide the students to choose and build their own pragmatic competence in making polite and appropriate request considering six properties stated above as
well as the strategies and modifications. For instance: “Could you please take that bag for me
, please?” Here, the students conceivable to apply a less direct request form by employing question or interrogative which has been seen as more polite
than imperative. In addition, when dealing with non-native speaker of English, EFL students may face some problems because there are sometimes huge differences
both from the language use and cultures as well as area or field they master. This issue leads the researcher to look deeper on
students’ pragmatic competence principally in making requests which closely relates to interlanguage pragmatics.