Cultivation Of Students' Pragmatic Competence Through Films

The thesis studies how to cultivate students' pragmatic competence through films on the basis of the ultimate goal of language teaching. The purpose of the study is to make foreign language teachers realize the advantages of films as a teaching tool in the culture teaching especially in the cultivation of pragmatic competence, and take the resources of films into teaching practice to enhance students' pragmatic competence.One of the important definitions in pragmatic study is context. And one of the significant distinctions between pragmatics and traditional semantics is that pragmatics takes context into study. Pragmatics studies the language in actual use, so context is dependable. Context can be divided into traditional static context and dynamic context generally. The traditional static context pays much attention to the restrictions of context upon communication but neglect the subjective initiative of the participants, while dynamic context does not.The thesis concludes the definitions, characteristics, and functions of films. Its advantages and strengths compared with traditional teaching books or materials when they are used in foreign language teaching especially their strengths in cultivating students' pragmatic competence. In the quantitative study, I investigated whether students' pragmatic competence was improved by analyzing the results in the pretest and post-test; in the qualitative study, I surveyed students' attitudes towards film-teaching. The author hopes that the study can give some help for the study of cultivating pragmatic competence with the use of films in order to compensate the limitation or weakness of traditional language teaching in cultivating pragmatic competence.