On The Cultivation Of Pragmatic Competence Of Vocational College English Majors

Pragmatic competence refers to the ability to use language appropriately in certain context, and it's believed as the key to successful communication. Therefore, the deficiency in pragmatic competence often impedes the appropriate comprehension of discourses and even leads to communication breakdown.In English language teaching, the ultimate goal is to cultivate learners'competence to use English appropriately in communication, so it's essential to develop students'pragmatic competence in practical teaching process. But in vocational colleges, teachers usually pay more attention to the explanation of textbooks and the training of students'language knowledge, while the cultivation of students'communicative competence is often neglected, thus the development of students'pragmatic competence is always ignored. Therefore, even the English majors of vocational colleges can't well manage English in communication--- they can't understand others and make themselves be understood. In cross-culture communication, they are likely to commit pragmatic failure and encounter embarrassment. Generally speaking, they are commonly weak at cultural awareness and unknowledgeable to pragmatics, their pragmatic competence is fairly poor.Then what are the main causes of their low pragmatic competence and how to cultivate English majors'pragmatic competence in vocational colleges? In order to explore the answers to these questions, the author conducts this study under the framework of related theories about pragmatic competence, pragmatic principles and pragmatic failure. A teaching experiment is the core of this study, in which an English proficiency test and two pragmatic questionnaires are employed to investigate English majors'linguistic competence and pragmatic competence. The tests serve three purposes: 1) To study the relation between linguistic competence and pragmatic competence of the subjects of vocational college English majors. 2)To analyze pragmatic failure and its causes. 3) To examine the impact of English teaching for the development of English majors'pragmatic competence in vocational colleges. In order to make the investigation as objective as possible, all the data are collected and analyzed by SPSS10. Through the analyses, the causes of students'low pragmatic competence are sorted out from two aspects---factors related to teaching and learning, and feasible ways of cultivating pragmatic competence of vocational college English majors are discussed. This study reveals that it's feasible to cultivate English majors'pragmatic competence in vocational colleges. The ways are put forward as follows: 1)To stress the development of students'pragmatic competence. By introducing pragmatic knowledge and providing more comprehensible input can improve students'pragmatic competence and raise English majors'awareness of language appropriacy and culture; 2)To reform teaching methods. Teaching methods are critical to the competence-oriented English teaching, and the reformation on teaching methods can strengthen the cultivation of students'pragmatic competence. 3) To emphasize in-service teachers'self-development. Teachers'development in knowledge and ability can upgrade the quality of English teaching in vocational colleges.Although there have been many researches done in this field, most of which concentrate on cultivating language learners'pragmatic competence in universities, colleges, secondary schools, and rarely on vocational college English majors. It is sincerely hoped that this study can shed light on the cultivation of pragmatic competence of vocational college English majors, and some implications may be produced on further studies in this field.