Pragmatics in the Context of English as an International Language: A Means of Decentering the Language and the Self

The field of pragmatics, as an outgrowth of Hymes (1974) sociolinguistic competence, was meant to be a reaction against Chomsky s (1957) myopic context-free notion of competence (McKay, 2009). In the context of second language education, the field, renamed as interlangauge pragmatics, has secured a special position in the thinking of professionals and researchers. Outgrowing the earlier conceptualizations of second/foreign language, English has come to be legislated as an international language – EIL. Within this newer conceptualization, pragmatics is still being emphasized and researched. However, the way pragmatics has been conceptualized in the context of EIL presents major challenges for language education and the learners’ identity. The first challenge relates to the excessive value assigned to pragmatics at the expense of other central features of language encouraging a pragmatic mode of expression (Givon, 1979) thus language being relegated to one among a variety of semiotic representational tools in EIL interactions leading to decentering the language. The second problem relates to a tendency to generalize the interactional pragmatic features of EIL to transactional functions of language. Another challenge relates to the extreme post-structuralist conceptualization of and overemphasis on the negotiated nature of the pragmatic norms and even the birth of new norms in new interactional contexts which renders establishing a common core for instruction impossible. Additionally, emphasizing the constant positioning of interlocutors in the contexts of interactions, de-historicizing and re-historicizing themselves in the moment-by-moment utterances (Kramsch Whiteside, 2008), and seeing realities through others frames of reference undervalue the sense of self and the identity associated with it.