Genres and pragmatic competence

How genres can be used to enhance pragmatic competence is an issue not adequately explored. Pragmatic competence is defined in this paper as a twofold ability relying on two types of competence: (a) pragmatic awareness, i.e. the ability to correctly identify pragmatically inferred effects in the form of implicated conclusions, e.g. irony, humour, contempt, respect, favouring, or incriminating attitudes conveyed by different text-types, and (b) metapragmatic awareness, the ability to meta-represent and explicate the link between relevant linguistic indexes and pragmatic effects retrieved by readers. Results from non-native university learners of English indicate that explicit genre-based instruction has significant positive effects on the development of genre-focused, convention-specific discourse but not on the development of pragmatic competence in low-level language proficiency learners. A positive correlation between language proficiency and pragmatic competence is further consolidated by the data.