American International Journal of Social Science

Making Learners Pragmatically Competent
Dr. Roy Pushpavilasam Veettil

Introduction
Globalization has brought the world together in an unprecedented way leading to the inevitability of a lingua franca for the world. So far, this role has been well played by the English language. However, the emergence of what has come to be known as World Englishes has resulted in certain pitfalls in effective communication. This happens at various linguistic levels such as lexical level, grammatical level, phonological level and discourse level. Every language is intimately bound to the culture it represents. Though English has taken up the role of an international language, it is inadequate to represent all the cultures wherein it is used either as a second language or as a foreign language. Therefore, English has been nativized in several ways to make it suitable to carry the cultural weight of the lands to which it has been transplanted. Thus, a knowledge of English at segmental and suprasegmental level alone is not enough if one is to succeed on international platforms. It also demands pragmatic competence. This paper is an attempt to highlight the necessity of making the learners aware of the varying pragmatics and the ways in which they affect intelligibility.

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