Speech Act Instruction-A Way To Develop EFL Students' Pragmatic Competence In Spoken English

As we all know, the ultimate goal of EFL teaching is to enhance students'communicative competence, the ability to use English to realize different functions of language. Therefore, the effective way for EFL teaching is to set up classroom setting for teaching the use of English.On the basis of the theories of communicative competence and speech acts, this paper first tries to defend theoretically the view that teaching and learning through speech act instruction can be an effective way to develop EFL students'pragmatic competence in spoken English.In order to find out whether those EFL students who have passed CET-4 are competent in choosing appropriate strategies to perform speech acts, and how EFL students'speech act competence is manifested in their choice of speech act strategies, this paper carries out an investigation on EFL students'speech act competence. The findings of the investigation proves that we should pay due attention to developing their pragmatic competence through the teaching of speech acts.To achieve this very goal of EFL teaching, this paper finally lays down some suggestions and guidelines for speech act instruction in classroom practice of spoken English. It is hoped that classroom instruction on speech acts can help the students to improve their performance of speech acts, and thus enhancing their pragmatic competence in spoken English.