Developing Students' Interlanguage Pragmatic Competence In College English Teaching

The ultimate goal of teaching a foreign language (FL) is to cultivate learners' communicative competence. However, learners' ability to communicate effectively does not simply depend on their linguistic competence, but mainly on their ability to use that language appropriately in different situations, that is interlanguage (IL) pragmatic competence. Hence, the development of FL learners' IL pragmatic competence is an important objective of FL teaching and learning, which is greatly influenced by classroom instruction.As a new interdisciplinary branch of study, interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) is a main part of second language acquisition (SLA). It describes not only the pragmatic characteristics of IL, but also the formation and the development of these pragmatic characteristics. Up to now, many ILP researches have mainly focused on non-native speakers' (NNSs) ability to understand and perform speech acts in given contexts. Besides, lots of studies have been conducted on pragmatic failures and transfers. However, only a few studies have been done on how to develop non-native (NN) language learners' IL pragmatic competence, and their research subjects are only confined to the English learners from several western countries, without touching upon those under the eastern cultural background at all (except Japanese English learners). In China, college students are a core part of English learners, and classroom instruction plays a very important role in developing FL learners' IL pragmatic competence. It is, therefore, quite necessary and worthwhile to carry out researches on how to develop Chinese college students' IL pragmatic competence by classroom instruction in a foreign language learning setting.With the help of former researchers and according to the theories of ILP, the paper first explores the IL pragmatic competence from three dimensions: knowledge, process, and content. Then with the reference of the factors of IL pragmatic competence and former research instruments, it conducts a questionnaire survey on college students from different grades and majors, trying to investigate and analyze the present situation of Chinese college students' IL pragmatic competence. After a statistic data analysis, many valuable findings have been obtained: 1) Chinese college students' IL pragmatic competence is rather poor, and a good control of IL linguistic competence does not guarantee a good level of IL pragmatic competence; 2) Chinese college students do a little better in IL sociopragmatic competence than in IL pragmalinguistic competence, but there is no significant difference in the two components of IL pragmatic competence; 3) Pragmatic instruction can facilitate Chinese college students' IL pragmatic competence development; 4) English majors have much better IL pragmatic competence than non-English majors, which indicates that to Chinese college students implicit approach is much effective to develop IL pragmatic competence.Based on the insightful implications provided by the findings of the survey for college English teaching, the thesis puts forward the mode of explicit instruction integrated with implicit approach including five phases or stages by which the pragmatics-oriented activities are implemented in classroom: expose students to the authentic context→explain metapragmatic information to students→immerse students in the authentic context→create the opportunity of communication for students→make corrective feedback. This mode of pragmatic instruction helps to raise students' IL pragmatic awareness, motivate students' subjective initiative and promote interaction and cooperation between students and teachers. Finally, the limitations of the research and suggestions for further research are also provided.It is assumed that this paper can be viewed as an important supplement to the ILP research field. The exploration of the concept "interlanguage pragmatic competence" may help to arouse people to the importance of this concept. And the discussions on the mode of classroom pragmatic instruction enrich the researches on how to develop and improve the IL pragmatic competence of English learners, especially Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL).