Acquiring Pragmatic Competence In A Multi-cultural Environment

Language is the basic tool for communication. Communication fails without the correct understanding or application of the language. In this way, the ultimate goal of teaching a foreign language is to cultivate students' communicative competence. However, the learner's competence to communicate effectively is not merely dependent on their linguistic competence, but also dependent on their ability to use their language appropriately in different situations, which is called "pragmatic competence".After Professor He Ziran's famous survey of Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic competence, teachers and students are beginning to know the idea of pragmatic competence. There has been no adequate attention being paid to pragmatic competence, which leads to the imbalance between linguistic competence and pragmatic competence. Based on my own personal experience, an EFL learner possessing relatively good linguistic competence, but relatively poor pragmatic competence, this thesis tries to investigate and analyze the relationship between pragmatic failure and pragmatic competence, why indirect speech acts and politeness principles are so important to pragmatic competence, and whether pragmatic competence can be possibly achieved through introducing and analyzing such pragmatic principles and pragmatic theories.Actually, the problem of pragmatic failure has been discussed for a long time in the field of foreign language teaching. But the thesis doesn't confine itself to pragmatic failure, but extends to pragmatic competence. The real aim of writing this thesis is to avoid pragmatic failure and boost pragmatic competence by offering some useful suggestions at the end of the thesis.