| It is already widely accepted that the ultimate aim of foreign language teaching is to make sure that foreign language learners have a certain capacity of making appropriate choices at the level of language production and interpretation in different communicative contexts, and only by which can we safely assume that after receiving several years of language instruction, language learners are, to some extent, able to communicate appropriately and effectively. On the contrary, this is definitely not the case of current EFL teaching in China. With years after years of grammar-centered instruction, the general level of such a capacity of Chinese EFL learners is rather suspicious. A class observation of university-level EFL learners, which is composed of a role play section and a personal interview section, was conducted in this thesis to dramatize this problem. From the rich information gained from the class observation, two points caught my attention: first, students in the classes observed were generally not able to complete simple tasks of communication appropriately; second, they did not show clear consciousness of contextual variables that functioned to influence their choice of expressions in specific situations.The reason for the poor performances of the students is their low level of pragmatic competence, the competence to use appropriate linguistic behavior in a particular situation. The inadequate pragmatic competence will always lead to misunderstandings between the interlocutors, sometimes even to communicative break down.The necessity of pedagogical intervention to enhance language learners' pragmatic competence lies in two aspects: to start with, China is an EFL environment, where there is no adequate and appropriate target language input available for language learners to integrate and assimilate, denying their natural acquisition of pragmatic competence of the target language; the second reason concerns the nature of pragmatic competence, which does not necessarily develop with grammatical competence, according to many researches.To solve the problem how to facilitate learners' pragmatic competence, this thesis argues in favor of politeness theory as a practical and feasible framework to teach English. To resolve some theoretical debate, politeness can be understood from a different perceptive - as a common sense notion and as a theoretical construct. From the angle of social appropriateness (Meier, 1995), politeness is viewed as the will to build, maintain and promote communication, in particular context, and to fulfill certain functions. By exploring and justifying its nature of being culture-specific and context-bound, politeness can be redefined as appropriateness. Such a view allows for the identification of universals in broader terms of contextualized social interaction with the advantage of universal, cross-cultural applicability, therefore can be a fruitful enterprise to guide pragmatic competence teaching.When it comes to actual instruction activity, politeness as a theoretical construct is needed as a feasible framework. There are three leading theories of politeness in the field of politeness research: Lakoff's politeness rules (1973), Leech's politeness theory (1983) and Brown and Levinson's face theory (1987).Brown and Levinson posit universal principles for linguistic politeness based on a social rationale. According to Brown and Levinson, interactants are generally concerned with managing each other's face by reducing the impositions of face-threatening acts, therefore, their theory is known as face theory. It surely has aroused a lot of criticisms from linguists for its claims for universals and Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism, but it is also the theory which has brought the most attention in the field of politeness and been most widely used in empirical studies, and it is almost the only politeness theory applied in the attempt to combine politeness with language teaching (Bou-franch and Conejos, 2003).Brown and Levinson's model claims that the choice o...
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