This chapter examines theoretical understandings and research findings related to the notion of pragmatic awareness within the field of intercultural language learning, highlighting important points of connection with the field of intercultural pragmatics. It first presents a critical overview of dominant theoretical understandings of pragmatic awareness within the field of language learning and then delineates key assumptions about the relationship between pragmatics and culture that have informed work on pragmatic awareness with a distinctly intercultural orientation. This discussion brings into focus a number of ways that sociocultural and socio-cognitive perspectives within intercultural pragmatics have contributed to an enlarged understanding of the nature of pragmatic interpretation and the close links between pragmatics and moral judgments. The chapter then addresses key findings and perspectives from empirical studies on pragmatic awareness within the field of intercultural language learning, highlighting implications for the field of intercultural pragmatics and areas for future development.

This chapter presents a cross-sectional study exploring the development of young Norwegian EFL learners’ appraisal of requestive behaviour in English and their metapragmatic awareness of the linguistic and contextual features influencing request production and interpretation. The participants were in the third, fifth, and seventh grade of primary school, aged approximately 9, 11, and 13. Through an Emoticon task performed in groups, the learners appraised a selection of requests they themselves had produced, and were subsequently invited to explain their choices. Direct requests were appraised increasingly more positively with age, while the opposite was the case with conventionally indirect ones. Hints proved the most challenging to appraise and discuss due to the discrepancies between their linguistic form and speaker intentions. Metapragmatic discussions revealed a more frequent focus on the linguistic features of requesting in all age groups, with the marker ‘please’ consistently emerging as the origin of positive appraisals. Although contextual features, such as the age of and familiarity with the interlocutor, place and communicative situation, were discussed less commonly on the whole, they appeared more often with older learners, resulting in more nuanced appraisals and suggesting a developing awareness of the interplay between linguistic and contextual features.

This chapter argues for a ‘humanistic’ approach to teaching Business Communication which aims to develop students’ critical language awareness (CLA). The chapter begins by establishing a rationale for the importance of CLA for business students. This is followed by a review of relevant literature which finds that, unlike in other areas of Languages for Specific Purposes, there is still a deficit in the acceptance and implementation of critical language pedagogy within Business Communication. I identify two types of critical language awareness: ‘metapragmatic’ and ‘socio-cultural’, which are not seen as binary, but on a continuum or cline. The remainder of the chapter demonstrates how these two types of CLA could be developed with Business students by providing a range of examples from my own teaching practice in a university setting. The activities are based on real-life written and spoken texts and aim to develop critical awareness in areas such as metapragmatic knowledge of different workplace genres, the interpersonal dimension of language or the values and ideology of a professional community of practice.

Chapter 4 focuses on the uses of general extenders that are speaker-oriented, representing the speaker’s point of view, or the personal function, also known as subjectivity. They are also described as stance markers when used to express personal feelings, attitudes and evaluations. Clear examples of this function can be found in those adjunctive phrases with pejorative terms as proforms. Other notable examples involve extended descriptions that seem excessive, yet iconically represent an excess of work or problems. Speakers can also use some adjunctive forms to indicate that they think the accompanying information isextreme in some way or, within a formulaic construction, to express an idea that is unexpected. The disjunctive form or anything can be used to express the minimum expected and is the typical phrase used in a formulaic disclaimer. The different origins and functions of Whatever and or whatever are described and, along with some adjunctive forms used with a dismissive effect, are analyzed in terms of metapragmatic awareness.