This paper suggests a series of steps for teaching complaint behaviour in English. The production of complaints requires a meta-pragmatic awareness of their interactive value and functions, their different types and realisations, pragmalinguistic formulae frequently employed or the socio-pragmatic factors affecting them, among others, which many didactic materials do not address holistically. Integrating relevant findings about complaint behaviour from pragmatics and various neighbouring disciplines, these pedagogical steps combine distinct teaching approaches and include production tasks and guidelines for assessment. Moreover, these steps also comprise an account of some communicative effects of complaints from the cognitive framework of relevance theory with a view to fostering learners' meta-psychological awareness.