The Effect Of Explicit Instruction On The Development Of English Pragmatic Competence Of Vocational College English Learners

In recent two decades, pragmatic aspects of learner language, one indispensable component of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) Research, have gradually attracted the attention of EFL as well as SLA researchers. Thus, a new interdisciplinary field—Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) has come into being, which is defined as the study of learners' understanding of the speech acts performed by native speakers and as the study of features and regulations reflecting learners' acquisition of speech acts in a second language acquisition (Liu, 1997). Research conducted in English as a Foreign Language context reports that classroom instruction has a great effect on learners' acquisition of pragmatic knowledge and pragmatic competence of target language. Therefore, it is an important and rising research topic in ILP research. However, some of current researches concerning the acquisition of pragmatic competence are mostly at the descriptive stage, lacking empirically quantitative analysis. Meanwhile, few ILP studies have focused on the relationship between pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence. Hence, we, both as teachers and researchers, still confront such urgent problems as follows: what kinds of instructional paradigms are supposed to be adopted in Chinese EFL classroom instruction; how to take advantage of Chinese EFL classroom instruction efficiently to teach Chinese EFL learners pragmatic principles, so as to raise EFL learners' pragmatic awareness and to cultivate their pragmatic competence.In terms of the speech act of compliment and compliment-responses, most studies have focused on foreign language learners' pragmatic performance by comparing and contrasting the compliment and compliment-response realization strategies utilized by foreign language learners and native speakers. Few cross-sectional studies on the speech act of compliment and compliment-responses have been conducted to explore pragmatic competence development. On the basis of cross-culture research on compliments and compliment-responses realization strategies, the present thesis, firstly, attempts to instruct the speech act of giving and responding to compliments, and train the experimental group (EG) to perform this...