Developing Pragmatic Fluency in English as a Foreign Language:Routines and Metapragmatic Awareness

Abstract

This study explores whether pragmatic fluency can best be acquired in the classroom by provision of input and opportunity for communicative practice alone, or whether learners profit more when additional explicit instruction in the use of conversational routines is provided. It is hypothesized that such instruction raises learners' awareness of the functions and contextual distributions of routines, enabling them to become more pragmatically fluent.Two versions of a communication course taught to advanced German learners of English for 14 weeks are examined, one version providing explicit metapragmatic information, the other withholding it. Samples of tape-recorded conversations at various stages of the courses are used to assess how students' pragmatic fluency developed and whether and how the development of fluency benefits from metapragmatic awareness.