This book has dealt with intercultural pragmatics and has focused on how both NNTs and their NT colleagues may be able to enhance their classroom instruction regarding TL pragmatics. While the ultimate goal is to improve the teaching of pragmatics for the sake of learners, who gain to benefit from insights as to how to be pragmatically appropriate in their TL of choice, teachers and teacher educators are intended to be the primary users of the material presented in the book. The aim has been to provide ideas for how to make pragmatics as accessible as possible to learners. As the numerous examples in the book would suggest (such as concerning the pragmatic import of filling pauses or not in Japanese), the real challenge for learners is that pragmatic behavior can be very complex. Therefore, the issue is how to simplify this complexity enough so that language learners do not get discouraged and are able to gain facility with at least some of the more crucial pragmatic behaviors, especially the ones that could readily lead to pragmatic failure if not performed appropriately. That is why I personally see advantages in having learners focus on idealized pragmatic behaviors, rather than those found in corpora which may be fully authentic but also highly complex. In other words, I am in favor of learnable pragmatics.

The first aim of Chapter 2 was to problematize the definition of pragmatics. The terms sociopragmatics and pragmalinguistics were seen to help in conceptualizing the different types of norms that learners need to grapple with in gaining control over TL pragmatics. Nonetheless, it was pointed out that what may appear to be sociopragmatic failure may actually be pragmalinguistic failure – that the learner had every intention of abiding by the norms, but perhaps overgeneralized the use of some language form incorrectly to a context where it is not appropriate.

The chapter went on to examine in depth three factors that contribute to the development of pragmatic ability.