Intercultural sociolinguistics and communication research in South Africa: Its relevance to academic settings and the service industry

Abstract

The increase in inter-ethnic and/or inter-racial communication in South Africa recently warrants concomittant increased attention, through intercultural communication research, to difficulties encountered in face-to-face interaction, such as: pragmatic failure and misunderstanding in same-language different-culture interaction. Pragmatic failure may lead, in the long term, to resentment, which, in turn, may lead to ethnic (cross-group) stereotyping and negative labelling. Misperceptions of non-native speakers of English has often contributed to the perpetuation (unintentionally though it may sometimes be) of exclusion and discrimination of the non-native speakers by native speakers, as observation in academic settings and the job market has shown. In this article, I use observational and elicited data of requests in English by university students to highlight the difficulties (and risks) posed by their lack of pragmatic competence in intercultural interaction. I tentatively discuss the teachability of speech act realisation and argue for the inclusion of pragmatic instruction in English language teaching and of pragmatics in teaching/learning materials, with two aims in mind: (i) to sensitise learners to the importance of pragmatic issues and heighten their metapragmatic awareness; and (ii) to alert 'gatekeepers' to the inevitability of variation in pragmatic competence due to the learners' or users' first language (L1), individual choices and preferences.