On How To Raise The Student's Pragmatic Awareness Through Reading Instruction Based On The Adaptation Theory

This thesis provides more insights into the effect of instruction on English reading comprehension of advanced level. Our study was motivated not only by the need to focus on students' grammatical knowledge in foreign language teaching but also on their pragmatic awareness needed in dealing with pragmatically relevant comprehension tasks. In particular, we examined the effect of instruction on pragmatics and reading comprehension by using the Advanced English textbook compiled by Zhang Hanxi, Wang Lili and Mei Renyi.The study reveals that advanced level language teaching and learning need to make pragmatics a planned learning objective. The authors and developers of advanced level textbooks need to supplement textbooks with metapragmatic descriptions focusing on pragmatically relevant comprehension tasks. Connections between the textbooks and language use, curriculum and lesson planning in the classroom need to be established for a more complete description of the use of English textbooks.Apart from dealing with instructional effect, we also demonstrated how to raise the student's pragmatic awareness to comprehend implicit meaning in the classroom context. A pedagogical implication derived from our findings. That is by noticing-raising and making good use of positive pragmatic transfer, to raise the student's pragmatic awareness through reading instruction based on the adaptation theory. This approach seems notably applicable to texts that present an argument, texts that aim to persuade and fictional texts.Chapter One states the motivation of the study.Chapter Two deals with the concept of pragmatics as a linguistic area, which looks at the use of language in context. Within this field, we introduce the theory of adaptation which expounds that language use is the continuous making of linguistic choicesChapter Three is divided into three sections. Due to the fact that pragmatic competence has been regarded as one of the main constituents in the different models of communicative competence (Bachman, 1990), the first section is devoted to the description of those models with a focus on the pragmatic component. In the second section, we take into account the developmental research of pragmatic transfer studies in the field of interlanguage pragmatics (Kasper and Blum-Kulka, 1993). In the lastsection of this chapter, we discuss the strategies of conveying implicit meaning.Chapter Four focuses specifically on the problems with classroom instruction on pragmatics and reading comprehension. This chapter is divided into two sections: the first one examines the possibility of learning pragmatics from the textbook (the book that our third-year students are studying in intensive reading);the second one analyzes classroom teaching methods envisioned by the textbook developers and publishers and the teaching methods teachers employed in their teaching practice.Chapter Five demonstrates how to raise the student's pragmatic awareness to comprehend implicit meaning in the classroom context.Chapter Six gives brief description of two main cognitive processing theories: the noticing hypothesis (Schmidt 1993, 1995) and the two-dimensional model of language use and proficiency (Bialystok, 1993, 1994). These theories serve as the basis of the classroom instruction on the development of students' pragmatic awareness.Finally, we include the general conclusion where pedagogical implications are highlighted.