Pragmatics, awareness raising, and the Cooperative Principle

In recent years, pedagogical pragmatics has sought to improve the effectiveness with which learners express and interpret meaning, through awareness-raising activities that draw on authentic materials and break away from simplistic explanations of form–function correspondences. By and large, these efforts have been informed by an inductive approach through which, over time, learners can infer general principles governing appropriate language use from an understanding of particular speech acts based on observation, description, and classroom discussion. This paper argues that learners can simultaneously benefit from a deductive approach which develops an appreciation of those general principles that background the performance and interpretation of speech acts. It is suggested that Grice's Cooperative Principle provides a useful means through which to implement such an approach and help ensure that learners use language in a socially appropriate way.