A Study On Pragmatic Development In Vocational College English Teaching

In the past two decades, pragmatic aspects of learners'interlanguage, one indispensable component of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), have gradually attracted the attention of EFL and SLA researchers. Thus, a new interdisciplinary field, i.e. Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP), has come into being. It focuses on the study of learners'interpretation and production of speech acts performed by native speakers and on the study of the characteristics and regulations reflecting learners'acquisition of speech acts in a second language acquisition. Accordingly, the study on the pragmatic development has naturally become one of the main research topics of ILP. To date, the pragmatic characteristics of learners'interlanguage and the relationship between linguistic competence and pragmatic competence have been well studied, but the study on the development of pragmatic competence and the factors influencing pragmatic development haven't been paid enough attention.The development of pragmatic competence is influenced by learners'linguistic proficiency, pragmatic transfer, classroom instruction, individual differences, etc. Recently, the influence of classroom instruction on pragmatic development has attracted more and more attention from the researchers in the field of ILP, which has become an important and rising research topic in pragmatic development study. However, as teachers and researchers, we confront such urgent problems as follows: what kinds of teaching methods are supposed to be adopted in Chinese EFL classroom instruction?; how do teachers take the advantage of Chinese EFL classroom instruction effectively to teach students pragmatic knowledge to raise their pragmatic awareness and to cultivate their pragmatic competence? Based on the theories of Acculturation model, Cognitive processing and Language socialization, the present study intends to explore how to develop Vocational College students'pragmatic competence from developmental perspective by investigating the following three questions:(1) What is the general level of students'pragmatic competence in vocational colleges?(2) Does pragmatic competence correlate with linguistic competence?(3) What are the factors that influence students'pragmatic development? The present study was conducted among 131 second-year students of Non-English majors from three different vocational colleges. They were divided into two groups according to the scores they achieved in the linguistic test. The first group was high proficiency learners who passed the mean scores of Linguistic Competence Tests (mean=72.8), the others was the group of low proficiency learners. The writer employed tests and interview as the main data-collecting instruments for the study. The statistical data were analyzed with the help of software, SPSS 10.0.The results reveal that the students'average error rate in Pragmatic Competence Test is 55.3%, which exceeds remarkably the undergraduates', showing that Vocational College students'pragmatic competence is at a poor level. Secondly, Vocational College students'pragmatic competence positively correlates with their linguistic competence, even though the correlation is not significant. However, the finding is inconsistent with the previous studies: Chinese EFL learners'development of pragmatic competence was not concurrent with that of the linguistic proficiency, and with the increasing improvement in linguistic proficiency, there was no corresponding increase in appropriate uses of English. Finally, classroom instruction, pragmatic transfer, linguistic proficiency, learning environment, motivation and contextual awareness significantly influence the development of pragmatic competence.Based on the results and discussion, the writer proposes that in the teaching process it is essential to integrate intercultural knowledge, pragmatic knowledge with linguistic knowledge and teachers should consciously raise students'pragmatic awareness in student-centered classroom instruction. Thus, a four-procedure teaching model is designed according to the five principles of explicit instruction and this thesis offers a detailed description of the teaching process: 1) inputting pragmatic information; 2) designing authentic context; 3) providing practice opportunities; 4) offering corrective feedback. The analysis reveals that the teaching model is effective for the development of Vocational College students'pragmatic competence.