An Investigation On English Pragmatic Competence Of Senior High Students

In 2017,the English curriculum standard of general high school proposed that the English Curriculum of general high school should be based on compulsory education to help students further learn and use English basic knowledge and skills,cultivate the ability to use language and develop cross-cultural communicative ability.In 2018,the Ministry of Education released the China’s Standards of English Language Ability(CSE),which aims to guide China’s English teaching and testing to strengthen the cultivation of students’ability to use language.The pragmatic scale is also brought into it.In the other words,in the face of the development requirements of the new era,pragmatic competence has once again attracted the attention of the public.How to assess students’pragmatic competence has always been a hot topic in the field of pragmatics.Many previous studies chose foreign assessment instruments,most of which are discourse completion tasks(DCTs),such as oral DCTs,written DCTs,multiple choice DCTs,etc.Besides,most of the subjects are college students,usually English majors or non-English majors,while there are few researches on senior high school students.Therefore,this study selects 266 students from two classes of senior one and senior two in a high school in Nanchong as the research objects,and the English teachers of the two classes in grade one and grade two are the same person.This paper chooses the Selfassessment questionnaire for English pragmatic competence in the CSE as the research instrument.Through a questionnaire survey,this article aims to answer the following two research questions:(1)How is senior high students’ self-assessment on their English pragmatic competence?(2)How is senior high students’ actual performance in the English pragmatic competence test? The survey is divided into two parts: self-assessment and test.The former using the self-assessment scale of pragmatic competence is mainly to answer the first research question;the latter using the test paper of pragmatic competence to answer the second research question.The data collected from the two research instruments are analyzed by SPSS 24.0 and Excel.After the analysis of the investigation,it has the following findings:(1)high school students’ self-assessment of English pragmatic ability is roughly between CSE 3 and CSE4,which basically meets the requirements of CSE for senior high school students’ English pragmatic competence(2)the average pragmatic competence of senior high school students is in the pass level with significant internal differences.By comparison,senior high school students have the best ability to use language appropriately,followed by pragmatic expression ability,and finally pragmatic understanding ability.In light of the above findings,the author analyzes the guidance significance of the pragmatic selfassessment scale in English pragmatic teaching,discusses the balance between grammar teaching and pragmatic teaching,emphasizes the importance of culture teaching in pragmatic teaching,and hopes that these suggestions will be beneficial to the cultivation of high school students’ pragmatic competence.