Pragmatic Competence And College English Teaching

The ultimate goal of teaching a foreign language is to cultivate learners'communicative competence. However, learners'ability to communicate effectively is not solely dependent on their linguistic competence, but it also includes their ability to use that language appropriately in different situations, hence pragmatic competence. Two decades ago, Professor He Zi-ran originated a survey of Chinese learners'pragmatic competence. Since then teachers and learners have gradually had a general idea about it. However, due attention has still not been paid to pragmatic competence, which leads to an imbalance between linguistic competence and pragmatic competence.This thesis attempts to investigate and analyze the present situation of Chinese college students'pragmatic competence by conducting a survey in the form of multiple choice questionnaire with two versions (in English and Chinese respectively).The result indicates that in general students'pragmatic competence is still poor and that there is little evidence of significant improvement across the two groups of non-English majors in Gansu Agricultural University in their first and fourth year respectively. It also reveals that the two groups of students show no significant difference in the two components of pragmatic competence: pragmalinguistic competence and sociopragmatic competence. The detailed analysis of the data further shows that pragmatic transfer is still the main cause of pragmatic failure and that the students with lower linguistic competence are more heavily influenced by pragmatic transfer, as indicated by a comparison between the two groups of Chinese learners'pragmatic competence in English and a group of Chinese native speakers'pragmatic competence in Chinese.Based on the insightful implications provided by the findings of the survey for college English teaching, the author makes some suggestions on how to develop students'pragmatic competence. We believe that raising students'pragmatic awareness is the key to the development of their pragmatic competence. Since pragmatic competence includes pragmalinguistic competence and sociopragmatic competence, the development of pragmalinguistic competence can be achieved through incorporating pragmalinguistic...