Enhancing English Language Communication Through Pragmatics: A Socio-Environmental Approach For Undergraduate Students

Abstract

Computer mediated communication has altered the way in which people converse with one another by enabling them to communicate information to one another over great distances and in real time. It does affect aspects at the pragmatic level of communication (e.g. politeness, relevance, implicature) but this is to be expected too. This paper explores the pragmatic dimensions of CMC with an emphasis on the impact of digital communication tools on discourse structure, interaction norms, and meaning production. It addresses a variety of practical issues, including how to be polite, how to wait one’s turn and how to discern the implicit meaning of comments in digital conversations. In addition to these, it takes into account social-environmental issues like digital access disparity, cultural practices, and power in online communication. For example, different degrees of access to the internet, digital literacy and socio-cultural context can contribute to differences in experiencing politeness and managing turn-taking and decoding indirect meanings. This research highlights how the nature of pragmatics is changing in digital contexts using authentic case studies and recent literature, thus drawing attention to the interaction of technology, socio-environmental variables and language behaviour. The findings extracted through an experimental study illuminate the bigger picture of how CMC is influencing the way we speak to each other and contribute to solving a digital debate.