Intercultural pragmatics in the Global Englishes context: Some implications for developing intercultural communicative competence

Abstract

The prevalent use of English as a lingua franca raises questions about the consequences for the practice of English Language Teaching. This paper investigates some of the pedagogical implications from the perspective of intercultural pragmatics. I argue that developing politeness strategies is an important aspect of enhancing learners’ intercultural communicative competence. This is illustrated with the examples of speech acts such as requests, conditional threats and conditional promises. I draw attention to some fundamental misconceptions that may arise from an inadequate interpretation of cross-cultural findings, and argue that in order to establish which politeness strategies to use in the context of global communication, the focus of intercultural investigations needs to be shifted from studying lingua-cultural differences to studying lingua-cultural similarities.