A Study On The Application Of Pragmatic Presupposition To ESL Writing In Higher Vocational&Technical College

As a kind of output language skill, writing has always been very crucial and difficult session in ESL learning and teaching. However, compared with the teaching of other three skills, such as listening, speaking and reading, the writing teaching is relatively backward and weak, especially in Higher Vocational&Technical College (HVTC). Higher Vocational&Technical Education (HVTE) aims to specialize in training of well-qualified applied-technique-oriented talent at the front line of production, construction, management and service. The students have different disparities in knowledge and culture and their English ability are still in a low level. In addition, there are some problems existing in the practical ESL teaching, such as a large number of students in class, limited periods, and amount of teaching task, which result in the lack of interest in learning English among the students. With the development of the society, the foreign advanced productive facility and techniques are brought into our country. It is required that the students in HVTC enhance their comprehensive abilities of using English, especially the writing ability.Pragmatic presupposition, a kind of inference, has always been the emphasis of pragmatic study. It not only concerns the linguistic structure, but also relates to context. Moreover, it plays an important role in pragmatic inference in the comprehension of utterance. The introduction of pragmatic presupposition can unite the thematic exercises in aspects of diction, sentence and consistency etc. in ESL writing class into macro-theory. It enables teachers to develop the mode design of writing class. Moreover, pragmatic presupposition provides an easily handled training method for ESL teaching of writing, which can improve unity, coherence, conciseness in student’s composition.This study is designed to explore (1) Does the pragmatic presupposition have the positive significance on the ESL writing teaching in Higher Vocational&Technical College?(2)What kind of teaching activities can be taken in order to integrate pragmatic presupposition smoothly into teaching process?The subjects of this study are the two non-English major (higher vocational school system) parallel classes in Jilin Teachers’ Institute of Engineering and Technology. On the basis of the actual teaching conditions, the integration of product-focused approach and process-focused approach is adopted in the control class; in the experimental class besides the integration of product approach and process approach, the research adopts new teaching mode which is designed according to the combination of pragmatic presupposition with cognitive context and Situational Language Teaching respectively in order to infiltrate pragmatic presupposition and presupposition triggers to the students. In this study, contrast analysis of pre-test and post-test of the two parallel classes proves that they have no significant difference in pre-test. Through the teaching practice of a whole semester, the writing abilities of the experimental class and the control class are both improved, but writing ability in the experimental class is enhanced more obviously. In addition, the author counts the number of the presupposition triggers in students’ texts, which proves that the number of presupposition triggers is always in direct proportion to the students’ writing scores. Moreover, based on the result of the questionnaire, the author offers some suggestions to the application of pragmatic presupposition to the English writing in the aspects of both teaching and learning.The innovation of the thesis is the special emphasis on the application of pragmatic presupposition to the design of writing teaching modes, which is beneficial to the teaching process. For instance, the teaching mode and concrete teaching activities, which are designed on the basis of combination of pragmatic presupposition, cognitive context and Situational Language Teaching respectively, are able to arouse the learning enthusiasm of the students. To some extent, the study relives the difficulty of "writing is difficult to teach" and provides a favorable reference for the reform of HVTE.