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part of an integrated skills curriculum.
In the second case, pragmatics content can dictate the organization of the
curriculum. Each unit could be composed of one or more of the following:
■
a speech act;
■
some conversational implicature (see Chapters 4 and 8);
■
use of epistemic stance markers (Chapter 6);
■
attention to discourse markers and fillers (Chapter 6);
■
some discourse structure of interest and relevance (Chapter 9).
Whether pragmatics is an add-on or actually dictates the organization of
the curriculum, the message needs to be heard loud and clear that it is not
sufficient to teach vocabulary and grammatical structures in a decontextual-
ized manner, but rather that the appropriate use of language in context
needs to be accentuated. Consequently, if teachers are to include pragmatics
in their instruction, they may well need to reduce the emphasis on other
goals to varying degrees in order to keep the cognitive load manageable for
learners.
In order to accommodate a possibly substantial change in focus and
principles, a pragmatics-oriented curriculum may include supplementary
materials that support teachers throughout the curriculum. A teachers’
guide could carry information about various teaching techniques for prag-
matics in general and specific pointers for each exercise and its assessment.
The guide could also provide empirically based information about learners’
L1 pragmatic norms. This approach may be particularly well received in
foreign-language settings, where the majority of learners share the same L1.
Sample pragmatics-focused curricular materials
Let us now take a look at curricular materials for teaching Japanese speech
acts to adult intermediate learners in a foreign-language setting. In doing
so, we draw from a web-based six-unit curriculum,
4
as well as from its 
3
Materials developed by Ishihara and Maeda (2010) constitute a preliminary effort to
supplement an already existing Japanese language textbook, An Integrated Approach 
to Intermediate Japanese (Miura and McGloin 1994). The sample of earlier efforts is at:
http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/japanese/IntroToSpeechActs/IAIJ.doc (accessed
December 10, 2009).
4
Ishihara and Cohen (2004: available online).

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