Understanding Utterances
The Need for Pragmatic Competence
Abstract
The colossal time spent on learning grammatical rules of a language may still not make a learner proficient in that language. The sociolinguistics perspectives have moved to the notion that there is more to learning a language than learning about rules and grammar. Since the use of a language is seen as a social activity, the concept of ‘communicative competence’, that is, knowing what to say, to whom, and how to say it appropriately was seen as an important element of teaching a language (Hymes 1965; Saville-Troike 1985). However, this concept is enormously complex. Before a speaker should know what to say and to whom in an appropriate way, s/he needs another competence, i.e pragmatic competence, to understand the meaning of utterances in context. This is because the divergent of what is said and what is implied have made communication difficult with many opportunities for mistakes and understanding to occur. This paper addresses the need of pragmatic competence to be taught along the other language skills.
Copyright (c) 2004 Kamisah Ariffin
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
