Speech Act Theory And The Development Of Pragmatic Competence In Tefl

In existing research of TEFL, more researchers have paid more attention to the absence of students' pragmatic awareness. The New National Curriculum Criterion requires the students to use the language synthetically, indicating that the students not only should have a good command of linguistic competence but also pragmatic competence.This thesis begins with a literature review on the speech act theory and especially on the speech act studies focusing on learners' pragmatic competence, and then the present author elaborates the relationships among the communicative competence, linguistic competence and pragmatic competence.Findings of these studies reveal that learners' advanced linguistic proficiency doesn't always guarantee their pragmatic competence. The author proposes real task-based approach to develop the students' pragmatic competence. Meanwhile, with the findings as the theoretic guidance, the writer conducts some small-scale experiments on the development of students' pragmatic competence through real task-based approach in a foreign language school. The research indicates that real task-based approach with the guidance of speech act theory can help to develop middle school students' pragmatic competence.