An Experimental Study On Cultivation Of Pragmatic Competence In College Spoken English Teaching

The ultimate goal of teaching a foreign language is to cultivate learners' communicative competence. However, learners' ability to communicate effectively is not solely dependent on their linguistic competence, but it also includes their ability to use that language appropriately in different situations, hence pragmatic competence. Pragmatic competence, an essential part of communicative competence, can ensure the efficiency of using and understanding language. Although students get enough linguistic knowledge, they can not communicate well, for the lack of pragmatic competence. So it is essential and of magnificence to cultivate students' pragmatic competence. Therefore this article explores good way to improve pragmatic competence through teaching practice.This dissertation consists of five chapters. Chapter one is an introduction to the background information, the goal and the meaning of the study and explanation of pragmatic principle, pragmatic competence and pragmatic failure. Chapter two introduces some important theories, including the concept of context, speech act and conversational implicature and achievements of past generations. Chapter three tells the principles and measurements. Chapter four carries on the experimental analysis. Two questionnaires were designed and distributed to the two groups of subjects before and after the experiment and both groups were required to take a pretest of each genre at the beginning of the experiment and a posttest to reveal the change after the experiment and then discuss the results of the study. Chapter five is the conclusions, suggestions on how to improve pragmatic competence and reflections on problems existing in the study.