A Research On Cultivating Non-English Majors' Pragmatic Competence Under The Multimedia And Network Environment

One of the aims of foreign language teaching is to develop students' cross-cultural communicative competence. Cross-cultural communicative competence includes two aspects: linguistic competence and pragmatic competence. Linguisticcompetence is made up of three components------phonology, lexicon, and grammar,while pragmatic competence, another important component of communicative competence, is the ability to select a linguistic form that is appropriate for a specific situation, or to use English appropriately in social interaction. The investigations on pragmatic competence of the Chinese learners of English made by domestic researchers during the last twenty years reveal that the development of the linguistic competence and pragmatic competence of Chinese learners of English is incongruous, with the latter one falling greatly behind the former one. The poor pragmatic competence will inevitably give rise to pragmatic failures or even communication breakdown in real communication. This thesis, accordingly, attempts to explore an effective way of developing the cross-cultural pragmatic competence of non-English majors through college English teaching.In the light of the constructivism, the author not only discusses the methods for pragmatic teaching, the factors which affect the development the pragmatic competence, the advantages of multimedia and network, the theories for college English teaching with the help of multimedia and network, but also makes a theoretical and empirical research into the effects of multimedia and network to the pragmatic competence cultivation. And the research results indicate that the students can reap a lot not only from the classroom teaching but also from their autonomous learning with the help of multimedia and network. It shows that improving teaching techniques consciously can improve students' pragmatic competence. Finally, the author puts forward some useful advice to guide college English teaching on the basis of the research results.