Construction Of Cultural Context And Strategies For Developing Pragmatic Competence

The paper is based on the theory of cultural context and deals with the topic that cultural context plays a very important role in cultivating the learners' pragmatic competence. Pragmatic competence as the main part of communicative component is connected with the construction of cultural context. The cultural context is constructed from two perspectives. One is from the cross-cultural aspects, while the other is constructed from pragmatic angle. In terms of cross-cultural study, the construction of cultural context deals with cultural belief systems, cultural communicative norms and cultural vocabulary. The belief system is derived from a whole set of beliefs including value view, ethics, word outlook and outlook on life, which influence speech act altogether. Cultural communicative norms prescribe every aspect of speech act, which are invisible. As for cultural vocabulary, it falls into three parts: physical words, social words and psychological words. With regard to the pragmatic aspect, the construction of cultural context covers presupposition, implicature and polite principle. Utterance relevance to cultural context is formed from presupposition. When the intended information in the utterance is comprehended with the help of cultural context, part of elements of cultural context are presupposed as pre-existing knowledge. Thus, those elements become the essential constitute of the utterance. Implicature has various functions in different cultural context. The intended information in the utterance is not the meaning of every word in it, but the meaning of utterance derives from the relevance between the utterance and context. The polite principle is applied according to the various cultural contexts. The application of polite principle depends on some pragmatic parameters, which are interpreted variously in diverse cultural context. Cultural difference of polite principle is due to the various explanations of those ones.The paper consists of six parts. The first part is the introduction. It mainly deals with the background and the purpose of the study. The second part aims to make a general study of context and its division, and functions as a basis of further research. The third part devotes to the construction of cultural context. Analysis of cultural context and its functions are illustrated. The cultural context is constructed from the cross-culture and pragmatic aspects. The forth part is the experimental study, in which the subjects are non-English students and which is conducted through two examination methods. One is test and the other is questionnaire. Based on the theory of cultural context, the experiment proves that the assumption of enhancement of students' pragmatic competence by constructing cultural context is feasible. The fifth part puts forward some strategies for development of learners' pragmatic competence in the aspect of listening, speaking, reading and writing. The sixth part is the conclusion. It concludes that by constructing cultural context, students' pragmatic competence is developed meanwhile their cultural awareness is fostered so that the quality of foreign language teaching is improved.