Pragmatic Competence And English Classroom Teaching

Reviewing the history of foreign language teaching in our country, we can find out that many teachers have paid too much attention to the training of students' linguistic competence, and have neglected the fostering of their pragmatic competence. Students usually cannot achieve their communicative purpose in real communication. With the development of international communication, people from all over the world began to communicate and cooperate with each other more and more, and English as the communication tool plays an important role. More and more English teachers have realized the importance of English pragmatic competence and pointed out that the emphasis of English teaching should lie in the usage. The purpose of this thesis is to combine some pragmatic basic theories into the practice of English classroom teaching: such as the notion "context" and its implications for English classroom teaching; speech act theory and its implications for English classroom teaching and the politeness principle and its implications for English classroom teaching. Based on these theories, I gave some detailed teaching methods further in classroom teaching: raising students' cultural awareness; performing explicit instruction and teaching language in context at different levels. I hope these ways could be helpful to improve the students'pragmatic competence.The whole thesis could be divided into six chapters:Chapter One is the introduction, which gives a very simple account of the present situation of college English teaching and the purpose of the whole thesis.Chapter Two involves some notions related to pragmatic competence, which bears relationship with English teaching. It first puts forward the definition of pragmatics and then gives a brief retrospect of the research on pragmatics and pragmatic competence both at home and abroad. And in the end, it introduces the concept "pragmatic competence". Chapter Three is mainly about pragmatic failures in English classroom teaching in China. It first gives the classification of pragmatic failure: pragmalinguistic failures and sociopragmatic failures. According to the classification of pragmatic failures, the third part of this chapter classifies students'pragmatic failures separately. Moreover, in the end it mentions the necessity of developing college English learners' pragmatic competence.Chapter Four is about the theoretical principles of pragmatics. This chapter introduces the notion of context and its important role in English teaching; meanwhile, it also introduces speech act theory, politeness principles and their implications for English classroom teachingChapter Five is about the implications for college English teaching. It puts forward some suggestions for language teaching: English teachers should raise students'cultural awareness and teach the language at different levels; meanwhile, performing explicit instruction is also very important in English classroom teaching.The last part is conclusion: pragmatic competence is as important as linguistic competence in English teaching. It is quite a long and difficult process to help foster students' pragmatic competence in a foreign language environment. In fact, it is almost impossible to do that perfectly, what we can do is just improve it and make it more and more perfect.