Raising pragmatic and socio-cultural awaireness of international students in EFL classrooms

Abstract: Apart from communicative fluency as the main domain of Communicative approach to teaching English to EFL international relations university students, there is one aspect of language that is often neglected or ignored by many instructors as being peripheral or even taken for granted. This is pragmatic and socio-cultural awareness, language accuracy in a specific cultural context. Foreign language students even if they reach advanced levels of linguistic competence, in our case university undergraduate students majoring in international relations should be taught the rules of appropriate culture-based behaviors in the English language. Knowledge of the language does not at all presuppose knowledge of the communication culture. This article emphasizes crucial importance of teaching various context-bound pragmatic behaviors and discusses teaching such aspects as conversational skills, turn taking and shifting, power-solidarity dynamics, storytelling mastery and structure and gendered language behavior in English language classes. These socio-cultural and pragmatic domains must be taught to the university students majoring in international relations to enhance their communicative mastery in the English language and bring them to near-native levels of language proficiency.