On Pragmatic Principles

For many years, foreign language teaching had always focused on students' linguistic competence, such as grammar and vocabulary. In recent decades, increasingly, researchers have a clear understanding about the relationship between linguistic competence and pragmatic competence. However, in foreign language teaching, students' pragmatic competence doesn't receive coordinated growth in accordance with their linguistic competence. One reason of it is due to the lack of correct understanding about the nature and content of pragmatic competence. Pragmatic competence includes not only pragmatic ability, but also and pragmatic knowledge. While people usually regard pragmatic ability as pragmatic competence, and neglect the important place of pragmatic knowledge in pragmatic competence.The author thinks that there should be a helpful way through applying pragmatic knowledge to the practice of foreign language teaching to promote the cultivation of students' pragmatic competence. Pragmatic principles belong to the category of pragmatic knowledge, so this thesis attempts to explore the problem from the angle of pragmatic principles.Firstly, the problem of the cultivation of students' pragmatic competence is proposed in this thesis. Then in Chapter two, theories about pragmatic principles, especially cooperative principle, the principle of relevance and politeness principle is presented. The presentation shows that there is close relation in pragmatic principles to the problem of how to interpret utterances in communication, and this point is important for pragmatic competence. This chapter forms the theoretical foundation of the later discussion. Pragmatic competence is discussed in Chapter Three,and at the same time, an investigation is taken to show the situation of students' pragmatic competence. This investigation also leads some thoughts about the relationships between pragmatic principles and pragmatic competence. Later in Chapter Four the relationships between pragmatic principles and pragmatic competence in foreign language teaching is analyzed. And it is proved that it is possible to cultivate students' pragmatic competence under pragmatic principles. Chapter Five probes some basic problems about the application of pragmatic principles in foreign language teaching, including teaching scheme, teachers' roles and students' roles. Finally, as a result, it is proved that the application of pragmatic principles in foreign language teaching is possible and helpful to promote the cultivation of students' pragmatic competence.