| English is understandable for its native speakers, but ESL learners may have difficulties in understanding the indirect nonlinguistic information present in English conversations. Knowing a language means much more than knowing the rules of that language; what is more, the speech acts in a language are much more complex than the language itself. To address this issue, Edward Albee's Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?, as one of the best pieces of the American drama, has been administered to speech act analysis. The results of the research show that pragmatic meaning is mostly different from linguistic meaning. It is the pragmatic meaning that needs to be taught in the ESL classroom, otherwise the learners will hardly ever be able to engage in intelligent nativelike communication. |
