ABSTRACT
It is commonly accepted that learners need to reach communicative competence to employ the second/foreign language (SL/FL) successfully. Reaching to that end, however, is not an easy task as learners need to develop many different competencies, such as pragmatic competence. Broadly speaking, pragmatic competence refers to the ability to use different linguistic resources in a particular way in a given social encounter. Then, learners should master two different types of pragmatic knowledge, i.e. pragmalinguistic knowledge and sociopragmatic knowledge (Leech, 1983; Thomas, 1983). The former involves the linguistic resources that are required to utter a particular communicative act. The latter refers to the appropriate use of those linguistic resources which are affected by some conditions such as participant’s role, social status, social distance and degree of imposition (Brown & Levinson, 1987).
