Exploring EFL Students and Teachers’ Perspectives on Promoting Students’ Pragmatic Skill through Raising Intercultural Awareness

Abstract

One of the major aims of Foreign Language Teaching is to achieve efficient communication that encompasses both linguistic and communicative aspects. However, English as a Foreign Language learners may suffer from communication breakdowns that are mainly due to pragmatics deficiency. Since this issue is becoming more and more recurrent among students, attempts were made to improve this skill. Therefore, cultural knowledge has been emphasized as a solution; i.e., raising students' intercultural awareness through making them acquainted with different cultural aspects. This latter would help in improving the use of language in context. Thereby, this study aims at exploring the role of intercultural awareness in enhancing students’ pragmatic skill. The study focuses on scrutinizing whether the goals of incorporating culture in Foreign Language Teaching were met through teachers and students’ perspectives. For this regard, and based on the hypothesis that students’ intercultural awareness is raised, then their pragmatic skill would be promoted, the research employs a descriptive analytical method with two different data-gathering tools. A questionnaire was administered to 103 second-year master students at the department of English Language, University of 8 Mai 1945 Guelma, accompanied by teachers’ interview conducted with 12 teachers. The aim was to investigate students and teachers’ views towards the efficiency of including culture in English as a Foreign Language classrooms to form pragmatically competent students. The findings proved the truthfulness of the hypothesis which show that intercultural awareness promotes pragmatic skill and both students and teachers affirmed that. Even more, they insisted on the great impact of culture and intercultural awareness in the learning process as a whole and pragmatic competence specifically