The Study On Cultivating The Pragmatic Competence Of Chinese Junior Middle-School Students

Oral communication is one of the basic means of communication in our daily life. Oral English communication plays a significant role in intercultural communication. The traditional exam-oriented education focuses on cultivating students' linguistic knowledge and ignores the development of students' pragmatic competence. Many Chinese students who have good performance in exams cannot communicate with foreigners for lack of pragmatic competence. Therefore, the development of students' pragmatic competence in oral English class is an important object of teaching and learning English as a foreign language.The present study focuses on cultivating the oral pragmatic competence of middle-school students in China. It analyzes the nature and features of oral English, as well as oral pragmatic competence. The study examines the pragmatic competence of different level middle school students by using questionnaires; it reveals that pragmatic failure mainly results from lack of pragmatic knowledge. The result also implies that pragmatic failure was due to inappropriate teaching methods and teaching principles. If the teacher adopted appropriate teaching methods, and deliver the pragmatic knowledge in the classroom, some of the students' pragmatic failures could be avoided. Besides, a number of...