USING CULTURAL PRAGMATIC SCHEMAS IN IMPROVING STUDENTS’ COMMUNICATIVE SKILLS
USING CULTURAL PRAGMATIC SCHEMAS IN IMPROVING STUDENTS’ COMMUNICATIVE SKILLS

Summary/Abstract: This study investigates the usefulness of using cultural pragmatic schemas in improving Arab students’ communicative skills. Linguistic behaviour is reflected through repetitive patterns of highly organized cultural repertoires. To better understand the relationship between such repertoires and actual language used by interlocutors, Sharifian suggested a new framework for studying cultural pragmatic schema. A group of Gulf University for Science and Technology students in Kuwait was given sets of specific speech acts and were asked to apply them in pertinent contexts. Having discerned the synergy between speech acts, as action verbs, pragmemes, as contextualized speech acts, and practs, as concrete manifestations of such acts, students have become more aware of the use and effectiveness of pragmatic schemas. They have become more confident in using pragmatic schemas in achieving their communicative goals. There is a great amount of cultural knowledge that is deliberately ignored in the English classroom because of prioritizing monolingualism. This erroneous technique erodes time and effort in the process of teaching and learning English as a foreign language. Making use of cultural pragmatic schema would give students a better opportunity to compare cultural strategies in manifesting a particular linguistic structure.

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