What is it about?
This article was an early effort to popularize notions about target-language pragmatics, both in terms of how to learn it and how to teach it. The main focus was on how to collect data about pragmatics from language learners, especially using verbal report techniques.
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Why is it important?
By now, pragmatics has gained a fair amount of visibility in the field. At the time that that article appeared, it was still very much a fledgling field. In fact at the time, while the terms existed -- sociopragmatics and pragmalinguistics -- they hadn't achieved the currency they now have, when referring to the social and cultural functions of pragmatics and the language forms as conditioned by the pragmatic reality.
Perspectives
Twenty years later it would be necessary to update this article substantially, but it certainly serves as a precursor for many of the issues which now abound in the pragmatics literature.
Prof Andrew D Cohen
University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Developing the Ability to Perform Speech Acts, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, June 1996, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s027226310001490x.
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