Iniciação na pragmática: reflexões sobre a conscientização pragmática para professores e alunos de línguas

In the past twenty years, interest in the pragmatic level of language has been growing among language teachers. Although it constituted oneof the cornerstones of the functional/notional approach, its role in intercultural communication has only more recently been recognized. Pragmatic differences between languages can leadto serious problems, and an awareness of them is important for language learners. One instrument which can be employed for alerting learners to such differences is the Discourse Completion Questionnaire (DCQ), which can be used to investigate speech act behavior. Although this methodology has been criticized for not being sufficiently sensitive due to the artificiality of elicitation, it seems pedagogically valid.