Interlanguage Pragmatics: Iranian EFL Teachers' Cognition

In curricula where teachers have agency to make decisions on everyday classroom activities, their cognition exerts strong influences on their pedagogical practices. The present paper reports on a qualitative multiple-case study exploring Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers' cognition of interlanguage pragmatics. Through triangulation of multiple methods and data sources, the study details descriptions of five Iranian EFL teachers' classroom practices, the cognitions behind these practices, and the way their cognition and the teaching context interact in shaping their everyday teaching practices. The findings suggest that underrepresentation of pragmatic competence in the EFL classes can be attributed to contextual factors such as deficiency in the EFL teachers' content and pedagogic content knowledge of interlanguage pragmatics and curricular decisions. The main findings are then discussed against the backdrop of the literature on interlanguage pragmatics.