A Study On The Modes Of Developing EFL Pragmatic Competence

With the rapid expansion of worldwide transportation and communication networks today's world is characterized as a"global village". That is, international interaction is growing more and more frequently. Thus, as a universal language, English becomes increasingly important to successful global communication. Nevertheless, nowadays there exists a serious shortage of such ability in China as understanding and communicating effectively with people from other cultures. Therefore, in college English teaching in China it has been established as the ultimate goal to develop learners'communicative competence that is composed of linguistic competence and pragmatic competence, to which less importance is attached all the while.This paper aims to conduct a systematic research and draw a clear picture on the current situation of English pragmatic competence of Chinese college students. The research is carried out by virtue of questionnaire survey in two freshman classes, Heilongjiang Institute of Science and Technology. The result of the first pragmatic questionnaire has revealed that those EFL Chinese undergraduates'linguistic and pragmatic competence develops inconsistently, the latter being quite poor and far less than the former. Subsequently, based on further analyses of subjects'responses to each item in questionnaires, it has been found that the poor pragmatic competence is mostly ascribed to such facts as follows. There exists a great blank among different cultures and an extreme lack of social interaction in course of learning English. Besides, pragmatic knowledge is in a serious state of neglect and negative pragmatic transfer appears in a high frequency.In order to resolve the problem, the author has tentatively designed a set of modes to develop EFL learners'English pragmatic competence, and specially applied it to the experimental class. It is generally believed that it is essential to integrate cultural comparison into English teaching, because cultural differences often cause miscommunication. In addition, due to shortage of teaching hours and linguistic environment, it is indispensable to make full use of Second Classrooms. In accordance, evaluation system also needs reforming to adjust to changes of teaching approaches. Certainly, the prerequisite for everything is that English teachers must be of high consciousness and competence in cultural and pragmatic knowledge such as Speech Act Theory, Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and the like.Through about four months of trial, the experimental class has taken the second pragmatic test, and the result shows that the set of modes to develop pragmatic competence is highly effective and practicable. Therefore, it is sincerely expected that the research is of great help and inspiration to those who have the same concerns and interests.