Disagreement and contradiction as communicative acts

Abstract

Communicative competence has recently been stipulated as a teaching objective of high rank. The basic unit of acts of communication, as seen by scholars that advocate a pragmalinguistic, functional approach in language teaching is no longer the well-formed, grammatically acceptable sentence, but rather the speech act that is appropriate to the situation in hand. More precisely, (dialogical) sequences of speech acts must be seen as the proper starting points of language analysis for didactic purposes. This paper attempts to enumerate the conditions of successful realization of one kind of speech act sequences, which though much used in real life situations, is underrepresented in classroom discourse: disagreeing, raising objections, contradicting somebody and so on. Because they can recur upon the proponent's formulation, acts of disagreement — dangerous as they might seem to classroom discipline — seem easier to perform (as to their linguistic encoding) than the much exploited question-answer sequences of traditional classroom discourse.