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Showing papers in "Applied Linguistics in 1983"


Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors argued that pragmatic failure is an area of cross-cultural communication breakdown which has received very little attention from language teachers and argued that it is essential to avoid prescriptivism in this very sensitive area of language in use.
Abstract: / have given the term pragmatic failure' to the inability to understand 'what is meant by what is said'. In this paper I argue that pragmatic failure is an area of cross-cultural communication breakdown which has received very little attention from language teachers. I suggest that there is one area of pragmatic failure ('pragmalinguistic failure') which is fairly easy to overcome. It is simply a question of highly conventionalized usage which can be taught quite straightforwardly as 'part of the grammar'. The second area ('sociopragmatic failure') is much more difficult to deal with, since it involves the student's system of beliefs as much as his/her knowledge of the language. I argue that it is essential to avoid prescriptivism in this very sensitive area of language in use. To do so we must draw on insights from theoretical pragmatics and develop ways of heightening and refining students' metapragmatic awareness, so that they are able to express themselves as they choose.

1,665 citations



Journal ArticleDOI

386 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Les limites du parallele entre la construction d'hypotheses grammaticales par l'apprenant et par le linguiste, and les problemes lies au recours a l'introspection grammaticale de l'aprenant as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: Les limites du parallele entre la construction d'hypotheses grammaticales par l'apprenant et par le linguiste, et les problemes lies au recours a l'introspection grammaticale de l'apprenant

118 citations



Journal ArticleDOI
Vijay K. Bhatia1
TL;DR: The authors investigate the possibility of presenting academic legal texts to learners of English for Academic Legal Purposes (EALP) in order to develop in them a set of appropriate reading strategies to handle authentic unsimplified legal texts on their own.
Abstract: This paper is a preliminary attempt to investigate some of the possibilities of presenting academic legal texts to learners of English for Academic Legal Purposes (EALP) in order to develop in them a set of appropriate reading strategies to handle authentic unsimplified legal texts on their own. It is a common belief in language pedagogy that authentic and unsimplified material should be presented to learners only when they have been prepared to handle such material. As Widdowson (1979:167) points out, 'the whole point of any pedagogic procedure is to defer the learner's encounter with what he will ultimately have to deal with until he has been prepared to cope with it. The pedagogy of any subject aims at guiding learners towards their terminal behaviour by the contrivance of appropriate intervening stages.' The intervening stages, generally, consist of simplified reading texts to which learners are exposed in the hope that having worked through such simplified texts, they will ultimately be in a position to cope with authentic, unsimplified material on their own.

71 citations


Journal ArticleDOI

58 citations