Pragmatics and Culture in Communicative Language Teaching

Introduction

Since the communicative turn in foreign language teaching, one of the biggest classroom aims (and difficulties) has been to teach language as a dynamic system of meaning potential rather than simply as a structural system. To teach 'meaning' is an incredibly complex affair in many respects. Within the context of communication, meaning is something which must ultimately be constructed by individuals as they pay close attention to each other's verbal and non-verbal cues and mobilize background knowledge and assumptions to interpret utterances within the flow of discourse. Moreover, such interpretation must take into account the sociocultural context in which utterances are exchanged, including the relationships between participants and what is being conveyed, not simply in terms of information but also in terms of the identities of the speakers and their social positioning vis-à-vis one another (Kramsch, 2009). The situation is even more complex in the case of intercultural communication, as ways of reading sociocultural context and the weighting given to particular aspects of context can be interpreted very differently, as can ideas about how speakers are expected to behave in view of their social and interpersonal roles (Spencer Oatey, 2008). Language learners, too, are actively engaged in interpretative processes right from the beginning of learning. Learners engage with the foreign language on the basis of existing assumptions about the nature of the social world, the way individuals interact in a range of social and interpersonal contexts, and what communicative behaviours are considered preferable over others. Within the foreign language classroom there is much potential for promoting intercultural learning by drawing attention to the ways in which participants in interaction, including learners themselves, construct and interpret meanings. However, whether this potential is realized or not is ultimately dependent on how the links between language and culture, as well as the learners' awareness of these links, are conceptualized. This chapter will focus on the conceptualization of these links within communicative language teaching (CLT) and discuss the ways in which views of pragmatic awareness dominant in the field have constrained the potential for intercultural learning.

The Place of Culture in the Communicative Turn

CLT has been strongly predicated on the existence of a close relationship between language and culture since its inception, although this relationship has not necessarily been well articulated within classroom practice. The influential work done on the ethnography of speaking in anthropology (Hymes, 1972), as well as the work by the natural language philosophers (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969; Wittgenstein, 1958) helped to highlight the nature of language as a form of social action and the centrality of cultural knowledge and assumptions to how communicative acts are structured and understood. Particularly influential to language teaching was Hymes (1972), whose notion of 'communicative competence' inspired applied linguistics to see the goals and methods of language teaching in new ways. Hymes (1972) argued that cultural knowledge is essential to any speaker's communicative competence, shaping judgements as to the significance of particular utterances and communicative sequences within larger speech events.

This competence ... is integral with attitudes, values and motivations concerning language, its features and uses, and integral with competence for, and attitudes toward, the interrelation of language with the other codes of communicative conduct. (Hymes, 1972: 60)

Culture helps individuals recognize the speech events which help constitute social life and the implicit and explicit norms which relate to these events and the individuals who take part in them. As such, it shapes the interpretive frameworks through which members of a speech community locate particular phrases, adjacency pairs, speech act sequences, conversational routines and other linguistic phenomena within the social activities that they help constitute (Atkinson & Heritage, 1984). Importantly, culture gives individuals a sense of what is expected behaviour given the sociocultural context in which language is used. This understanding of language as a tool for negotiating social life resonated with many applied linguists, and subsequently led to the operationalization of communicative competence for the purposes of language teaching by Canale and Swain (1980), Bachman (1990), and others. Most models see the interface between language and culture in terms of two types of linguistic mapping – the mapping between linguistic forms and functions and the mapping between linguistic functions and features of sociocultural context. For instance, in Canale and Swain's (1980) work, culture is most closely related to 'sociolinguistic competence', which encompasses 'rules of use' and 'rules of discourse' for spoken interaction in context. 'Rules of use' concerns both the appropriateness of particular utterances for achieving particular functions, and the appropriateness of choice of communicative function in a given sociocultural context. 'Rules of discourse', on the other hand, concerns the appropriateness of the sequencing of utterances within a specific speech event. Culture is thus seen in terms of knowledge of how to linguistically formulate utterances and situate them appropriately given the nature of the speech event and other contextual variables at play.

Viewing appropriateness from the dual perspective of form-function mappings and function-context mappings resonates with the distinction between pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics (Leech, 1983; Thomas, 1983). Pragmalinguistic knowledge allows the individual to select appropriate forms for carrying out particular communicative functions, while sociopragmatic knowledge guides the individual in making judgements regarding the appropriateness of language use in view of sociocultural context and the roles and relationships relevant to a situation. This is why Leech (1983: 10) famously remarked that 'sociopragmatics is the sociological interface of pragmatics'. Whenever language is used in its social context, its meaning is only interpretable through 'social values and expectations' that fill out a particular context of use (Coupland & Jaworski, 2004: 19). Essentially, cultural assumptions about social roles, relationships, gender, age, locations, genres of communication, and many other variables influence communicative choices and the ways in which individuals make sense of communicative acts within larger social activities. Cultural knowledge, therefore, is fundamental...