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communication by using linguistic units in an appropriate way based on the social context and value of politeness related to the degree of power, rank, and imposition.
3. The notion of Pragmatic Competence
The main goal of learning a language is to develop communicative competence, which was introduced for the first time by Hymes 1972. Widdowson 1978 stated
that meaningful communicative behavior is what to attain by a language learner. Accordingly, linguistic communicative competence includes two aspects namely;
grammatical competence and pragmatic competence. Shridar 1996: 48 stated that social use of language approach enables the learner to understand about the
interaction of language and society, the contribution of social context to linguistic meaning, the social functions of language, and the use of language as a major social
institution. However, a framework of communicative competence, consisting of at least four
components: Linguistics or grammatical competence, Sociolinguistic competence, Discourse competence, Strategic competence, basically intended for teaching and
learning foreign or second language was first proposed by Canale and Swain 1980: 27. Nevertheless, Bachman 1996 proposed a pragmatic competence as one of the
important components of communicative competence. In Bachman’s model, language competence falls into two fields; language knowledge and strategic competence.
Celce-Murcia et.al 1995 proposed another model following Canale-Swain’s. Here, another competence was added, i.e., actional competence to complete Canale-
Swain’s model, which is conceptualized as competence in conveying and understanding communicative intent by performing and interpreting speech acts and
speech act sets. As Crystal in Kasper and Rose, 1999 pointed out, that pragmatics is the study of
the communicative action in its socio cultural context, it can be stated that individuals, have different forms of pragmatic competence, which allows them to use
language in real life situation contextually. Therefore, pragmatic competence is focally studied at the social level in the limits of speech acts and social acts for the
interaction. The area of pragmatic competence is studied in terms of sociolinguistic
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competence and discourse competence. Whereas, pragmatic competence in foreign language contexts is defined as the knowledge of communicative action or speech
acts, how to perform it, and the ability to utilize the language in proper ways based on the context or contextual factors Kasper, 1997.
Celce-Murcia, et al 1995: 19 stated that “pragmatic competence is a set of internalized rules to use language in socio context appropriately, with regard to the
participants in a communication”. Pragmatic competence can be interpreted as the competence to employ language for appropriate communication, which can be
simplified as the two major aspects of expression and comprehension Ziran in Chen, 2011. That is to say, pragmatic competence is the competence of speakers to employ
appropriate and accurate language to express their thought and apprehend the meaning and intention of what the other speaker says Chen, 2011. Nevertheless, to
acquire appropriateness of pragmatic performance, it very much “depends on sufficient linguistic and pragmatic knowledge, as well as on overall strategic
capacities to implement the knowledge in communicative interaction” Taguchi, 2006.
4. Notion of Interlanguage Pragmatics
