ABSTRACT
Students often come to teachers with questions about what to say in a particular situation. It is tempting to answer these questions with a spontaneously created dialogue and some appropriate vocabulary or syntax. Rarely, however, does the answer describe the various pragmatic moves the addressee is expecting or how the addressee will interpret deviations in the moves. Yet research suggests that the greatest source of difficulty in communication may not come from syntax and phonology, but rather from a failure to meet the pragmatic expectations of the discourse community.
