Intercultural competence and pragmatic failure: compliments and disagreements in EFL

Abstract

Mastering a foreign language involves more than having a good linguistic competence. In fact, one of the most difficult aspects is acquiring the necessary pragmatic competence (Hymes, 1972) to perform a specific speech act suitably according to context and the interlocutors’ expectations and beliefs (Yates, 2010; Piller, 2017). In the L1, such pragmatic knowledge is both learnt and acquired throughout the individual’s ‘acculturation process’ (cf. Schumann, 1986). However, it might be a source of misunderstandings and stereotype reinforcement when using L2, especially in the case of intercultural situations, where interlocutors may bring different ‘pragmatic expectations’ to the encounter and where pragmatic failure is more likely to take place. In this paper, I shall focus on the notion of pragmatic failure (Thomas, 1983) and the related concept of dissonance (Zamborlin, 2007) and how they might play a crucial role in intercultural communication. More specifically, two speech acts will be analyzed: compliments (and their responses) and disagreements. The reason for selecting these two acts is that they might be regarded as extremes in terms of the interlocutors’ positive face. Thus, compliments might be employed as a way to build up positive face whilst disagreement inflicts a clear threat to the interlocutors’ positive face. Precisely because of their “extreme” character, both speech acts may lead to pragmatic failure in intercultural encounters. As language teachers, one of our crucial roles is hence help our students to develop both their pragmatic competence in L2 but, even more importantly, to raise their meta-pragmatic awareness.