A Study On Freshmen's Pragmatic Competence Of English Majors And It's Implications To Teaching

Language is not only an instrument for human communication, but also the one for them to maintain harmonious interpersonal relationships. Language learners need to have a good command of its system of grammar, lexicon and pronunciation, moreover, they need to know how to communicative with others in a proper and effective way. However, many teachers have laid much more emphasis on the training of learners'linguistic competence, without focusing on the cultivating of learners'pragmatic competence. Therefore, the learners can utter some correct sentences according to the grammar, but cannot communicate with others effectively in the real life.The subjects of studies on pragmatic competence of English learners home and abroad are mostly non-English majors. There are fewer researches on English majors'pragmatic competence and pragmatic failure. The revised version of English Syllabus for University English Majors (2000) has revised an item,'fostering and enhancing learners'cross-cultural communicative competence', which emphasizes the language in use. Apart from the accuracy, the sensitivity to other cultures and the flexibility of handling the differences of cultures is emphasized. Cross-cultural communicative competence put forward by Widdowson (1978) contains two points: linguistic competence and pragmatic competence. Linguistic competence is made up of phonology, lexicon and grammar while pragmatic competence is the ability to use the language properly in specific social interactions. Hence, it is imperative to develop learners'pragmatic competence.In order to figure out the current situation of freshmen's pragmatic competence of English majors, an investigation is carried out through a questionnaire for students. This questionnaire is mainly about their ability to realize such daily interactive acts as greeting, addressing, refusal, apologizing, appreciation, sociopramatic questions and pragmalinguistic questions. The subjects are the freshmen of English majors from SISU,foreign languages and literature school, foreign trade and business college of CQNU. The result reveals that English majors'pragmatic competence is not as good as that we are always holding. College English teaching for English majors has much room for improvement in terms of English majors'pragmatic competence.This paper also describes the potential pragmatic failures in details that freshmen of English majors are prone to produce in inter-cultural interaction. And through analyzing these failures, some advice and feasible measures on how to foster English majors'pragmatic competence are given at the end of this thesis, including raising freshmen's cultural awareness, explicit instruction of pragmatic principles and theories teaching language in context, enhancing freshmen's positive pragmatic transfer, providing more opportunities of communication, utilizing the model of Internet.