SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION COURSE - PRAGMATIC ASPECTS RESUME

INTRODUCTION 

The growing interest in interlanguage pragmatics reflects the enormous developments in the theoretical and empirical study of pragmatics over the last two decades (see Levinson 1983 Coulthard 1985 Hatch 1992, for surveys of the field). 

Pragmatics is the term used to refer to the field of study where linguistic features are considered in relation to users of the language (Levinson1983). 
Pragmatics is the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context. Communicative action includes not only speech acts - such as requesting, greeting, and so on - but also participation in conversation, engaging in different types of discourse, and sustaining interaction in complex speech events. 
When speakers perform utterances in context they accomplish two things: 

1. Interactional acts impose structure on the discourse by ensuring that one utterance leads smoothly to another. 
2. Speech acts constitute attempts by language users to perform specific actions, in particular interpersonal functions. 

Interlanguage Pragmatics is defined as the study of 'learners' use and acquisition of linguistic action patterns in a second language (Bardovi-Harlig, 1996 Kasper, 1999 Rose, 2000). 
There is a basic premise in interlanguage pragmatics that it is not enough just to know the equivalent words and phrases in a second language (L2). Learners need to determine the situationally-appropriate utterances, namely what can be said, where it can be said, when it can be said, and how to say it most effectively.