A Study On The Role Of Pragmatic Presupposition In ESL Writing

Presupposition, which philosophers and linguists have discussed, is a very important topic in pragmatics. However, presupposition has long been neglected in ESL writing in China. Some problems existed in writing teaching about the presupposition studies: (1) most of the researches on presupposition have been directed to its effects on the writer instead of on the reader; (2) the linguists are mainly concerned with establishing theoretical models for presupposition, and few tried to teach pragmatic presupposition in class for its practical usage; (3) English writing teaching still focuses on the sentence-oriented level, not on the text-oriented level. (4) the experiment was not conducted in most studies; (5) very few studies were aimed at Chinese ESL learners.Taking these problems into account, this thesis is an attempt to study the role of pragmatic presupposition in ESL writing so as to help students make a coherent discourse, and improve their writing ability. It is expected that the study will provide reference data for the pedagogical reform of English writing course. The theories of Leech, Levinson, Miao Xingwei, Zhang Keding, and Zhu Yongsheng, which has had a major impact on the learning and the teaching of pragmatic presupposition, are employed in the present study.This study is designed to explore:(1)Does teaching pragmatic presupposition result in improving students' scores in ESL writing?(2)Does pragmatic presupposition have the correlation with the quality of composition?(3)Does the role of pragmatic presupposition benefit teachers' writing class language?In this study, sophomore English majors of Liaoning Normal University being the subjects in the experimental class (EC) were taught pragmatic presupposition in addition to a process method, while the students in the control class (CC) were taught only through a process method. Both classes did almost the same amount of exercises, but with different focus: both the CC and EC focused on problematic structures, sentences etc., but the EC with extra attention to pragmatic presupposition. Each class wrote six compositions, and the first test (IC-Pre), the third and the fourth of the second assigned composition (3-Pre and 4-Post) and the last one (IC-Post) were rated by three experienced teachers independently with the rating scale for the writing item in Band IV Test for English Majors(TEM-4).The SPSS procedure was used to do the calculations. First, independent samples t-test was employed to make a general examination on the overall quality of the IC-Pre, IC-Post, 3-Pre and 4-Post in both classes. The results indicated that the EC and the CC did not differ from each other significantly at the beginning of the experiment (p>.05), but they did differ statistically at the end of the experiment (p<.05).With all the other variables controlled, the instruction on pragmatic presupposition facilitated the EC's progress. Second, to further examine whether there is correlation between the number of presupposition triggers and the quality of composition, correlation analysis was used. The result demonstrated that there was positive correlation between the number of presupposition triggers and the quality of composition. Third, two questionnaires were used to collect data on the evaluation of students' learning and teachers' teaching pragmatic presupposition.The results of the study suggested that the EC students made the greatest progress in their compositions after the instruction on pragmatic presupposition, whose success can be attributed to a number of factors: (1) learning pragmatic presupposition makes students more sensitive to the reader's needs; (2) using pragmatic presupposition becomes one of the important strategies for students that will do better in their revising process; (3) applying pragmatic presupposition facilitates their peer editing activity. The major findings demonstrated that teaching pragmatic presupposition to L2 learners can be regarded as an effective method to improve their writing ability. Thus, the author summarized valuable implications for the promotion and reform of English writing teaching in the following three aspects: (1) it offers teachers a new perspective to look at writing process; (2) it supplies teachers with a feasible method to teach writing; (3) it offers concrete and practicable teaching procedures for reference; (4) it is useful for text compiling.