Agency and Pragmatic Independence in Foreign-language Communication

This book promotes a teaching approach which builds on learner experience, assets and knowledge. By exploiting existing learner resources and knowledge of the world, the book identifies and stresses the need to draw upon first and additional-language/cultural resources and experiences by recognising that language users have choices regarding how they want to participate on interpersonal, interactional and transactional levels. In order to achieve successful (and overcome less successful) meaningful communication, the living experiences, histories and resources which language users bring to the additional-language context are honoured and serve as the basis of the teaching/learning approach. Rather than focusing on decontextualised language structures and on what learners might get wrong, the author argues that teachers should help learners develop a sense of agency and control, pragmatic processing ability and investment. This book will be of interest to ELT researchers, foreign language teachers, teacher trainers, researchers and postgraduate students in applied linguistics.

Gerrard Mugford is a professor at the Universidad de Guadalajara, Mexico. His published research articles and chapters cover pragmatics, politeness and critical pedagogy. Recent publications include Exploring the Power of Social Talk in a Foreign Language: Possibilities for Integration and Critical Pedagogy (2024) and Critical Foreign Language Teaching (2025).