Speech Acts in English Language Teaching

This paper is an attempt to investigate the role of speech acts in second/foreign language teaching. It first starts with an analysis of the term grammatical competence and its comparison with the more comprehensive term communicative competence. It then deals with the components of the communicative competence emphasizing the role of speech acts in our daily use of language. Next, it looks into various techniques used in teaching speech acts. Finally, the term speech act set is introduced and its application in developing language teaching materials is examined.