On The Cultivation Of Pragmatic Competence Of Secondary Vocational School Students

The cultural communication is being intensified through the rapiddevelopment of science and technology, the permeating and merging ofsocial arts and sciences, and the informationalization of knowledge andtechniques. The aim of foreign language education is to develop students'communicative competence. The traditional English teaching mainlyemphasizes grammatical knowledge. Teachers pay little attention onstudents' pragmatic competence. That is to say, students concentrate onremembering vocabulary and grammars. Some researches show thatstudents' pragmatic competence, generally speaking, does not match theirlinguistic proficiency. As a result, the "deaf–and-mute" English appears.Students can pass all kinds of tests, but they may have difficulties incommunicating with native speakers appropriately. We call this kind ofmistake "pragmatic failure" which includes pragmalinguistic failure andsociopragmatic failure. It is not enough only to master phonology,vocabulary and grammar in English learning. To use a languageappropriately, one must know some knowledge of the culturalbackground, speaker's intention and listener's inference and so on. Thismeans that students must have some pragmatic competence.Pragmatics is a theory which sees to characterize how speakers usethe sentences of a language to effect successful communication(Kempson, 1975: 84). The use and understanding of language in aspecific context is defined as pragmatics. It has developed into a dynamicdiscipline from the "waste-basket" of semantics within a short periodsince its name was first introduced into the literature by the Americanphilosopher Charles William Morris in 1938. Pragmatics is developingvery quickly in recent decades since it was introduced to China in 1980s."The pragmatic research carried out in China can roughly be divided intothree aspects: 1) pragmatic research is geared to the needs of foreignlanguage teaching;2) pragmatic research is developed towards Chinesegrammar and pragmatic usage;3) theoretical research in pragmatics."(Shen Jiaxuan, 1996). Pragmatic competence is "the ability to uselanguage effectively in order to achieve a specific purpose and tounderstand language in context" (Thomas, 1983: 94). It is very importantto the maintenance of interpersonal relation and continuity of socialactivities.Generally speaking, the students of Secondary Vocational School arenot good at English. With the expanding of colleges and the promoting ofhigh schools, the students' quality of Secondary Vocational School isgoing down gradually. Many students come to the vocational schoolswithout any entrance examination. These students have no good learninghabits, and some of them detest and reject learning English. But therequest of the society decides that they must learn English well,especially to communicate with foreigners appropriately in English.Therefore as teachers, we should concentrate on cultivation of students'pragmatic competence. Then how to cultivate their pragmatic competencein English class? What methods should we take to improve theirpragmatic competence?In order to prove the author's hypothesis "improving teachingtechniques consciously can improve students' pragmatic competence",the author conducts an experiment on her two natural classes of Grade2004 from No.6 Vocational School in Jinan. The author has three aims inthis study: (1) Study the relation between pragmatic competence andlinguistic competence. (2) Analyze the pragmatic failures and theirsources. (3) Study what teaching methods can be used to developstudents' pragmatic competence. The students are assigned randomly toan experimental group and a control group. Before the experiment, theauthor administers a proficiency test and a pragmatic pre-test to the twogroups. The author use Software Statistical Package for Social Science(SPSS) to analyze the data through computer. The result from the testshows that there is no significant difference between the two classes'pragmatic competence and the growth of their pragmatic competence isnot in pace with that of their linguistic competence. Based on the resultsof the test, the author analyzes possible causes of pragmatic failure.During the experimental period of about three months, the two groups aretreated differently. For the control group, only linguistic knowledge isemphasized, sometimes with some background knowledge introduction.While in the experimental group, both linguistic and cultural knowledgeare emphasized. The author often introduces some useful pragmaticprinciples to the students and integrates cultural components intolanguage teaching.After the experiment, the two groups are immediately required totake part in another pragmatic post-test. Data gained from the test showsthat there is a significant difference between the mean scores of theexperimental group and the control group. The mean score of theexperimental group, whose pragmatic competence had been consciouslyemphasized and cultivated for the past three months, is higher than that ofthe control group, whose pragmatic competence had been neglectedduring the experiment. Meanwhile, there is a significant differencebetween the mean score of pragmatic pre-test and post-test of theexperimental group, while that of the control group is not significant.The result of the experiment reveals that there is no significantcorrelation between pragmatic competence and linguistic competence;thelack of pragmatic knowledge and cultural background are the mainsources of pragmatic failure;consciously improving teaching techniquescan greatly improve students' pragmatic competence, such as: introducingpragmatic knowledge to students, paying attention to culture teaching,using task-based method and so on. Although developing pragmaticcompetence takes up the normal teaching time, and inevitably affects theprogress of teaching program, it contributes to the enhancement ofstudents' ability in listening, speaking, reading, and writing whiledeveloping their linguistic competence so as to communicate with nativeEnglish speakers smoothly in English.This thesis is blazing a trail in the integration of pragmatic theoriesand vocational school students' EFL. The author uses task-based methodto cultivate students' pragmatic competence firstly. As a new researchfield it is open to discussed and improved. There are some limitations inthis thesis: 1) The time is not enough so the author can't generalize all thepragmatic failures;2) The students of two classes in Jinan No.6Vocational School can't fully represent the students all over the country.But also because of the limitations, the future of this kind of study is wideto attract more people to concern the vocational school students'pragmatic competence.