The relationship between pragmalinguistic analysis and linguodidactic design in preservice English teacher education

Abstract

This article examines how pragmalinguistic analysis can inform linguodidactic task design in preservice English teacher education. The study compares theoretical accounts of linguistic pragmatics, communicative language teaching, and teachers’ professional knowledge. It distinguishes the linguistic form of an utterance from its communicative intention and context-dependent interpretation. An instructional sequence is proposed in which prospective teachers identify contextual variables, infer speaker intentions, compare alternative responses, design a learning task, and assess its outcome against the communicative situation. Constructed examples of indirect refusal and mitigated disagreement demonstrate why teaching a single supposedly correct expression offers an insufficient basis for pragmatic instruction. These examples illustrate analytical procedures rather than report classroom observations or experimental data. The discussion emphasizes interlocutor relationships, interactional goals, and variation in English language use. The proposed sequence treats methodological decisions as an explicit part of teacher preparation instead of reducing pragmatics to a collection of fixed, decontextualized conversational formulas.