Develop Students' Pragmatic Competence In High School English Teaching

Pragmatics is one of the rapidly growing fields in contemporary linguistics. It is concerned with the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker (or a writer) and interpreted by a listener (or a reader). It has greatly influenced foreign language teaching. A chief purpose of learning a foreign language is to be able to communicate in that language, in another word, to use that language appropriately. Therefore, special attention should be directed to the training of students' pragmatic competence. However, many teachers still put more emphasis on teaching the linguistic form, while ignoring the development of students' pragmatic competence. Research evidence has shown that high levels of grammatical competence do not guarantee concomitant high levels pragmatic competence. The knowledge of pragmatics should be taught and pragmatic competence will be developed by using the knowledge in daily practice. A further investigation will make us more aware of the importance and the urgency of developing students' pragmatic competence. Then this thesis puts forward several practical approaches to the development of students' pragmatic competence in the situation of English classroom teaching and makes an experiment to prove it.This thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter One analyzes the relationship between pragmatics and high school English teaching and gets a conclusion that it is necessary to teach English with the help of the theories on pragmatics and it is urgent to develop students' pragmatic competence. Chapter Two introduces some important theories of pragmatics, including Speech Act (Austin), Indirect Speech Act (Searle), Cooperative Principle & Conversational Implicarure(Grice), Politeness(Leech) and the concept of context. Chapter Three investigates some students and teachers. The questionnaire shows students' deficiency in pragmatic knowledge. We can also see foreign language teachers gives little emphasis on developing learners' pragmatic competence. Chapter Four is the most important part of the thesis. It deals with the experiment and verifies the feasibility of cultivating learners' pragmatic competence by classroom instruction. The thesis focuses on how to improve students' pragmatic competence in classroom situations. Concerning with the problems revealed during the experiment, the author gives some suggestions in Chapter Five.The aim of the thesis is to call for the teachers' recognition of cultivating students' pragmatic competence in foreign language teaching and it is hoped that the author will further the research in the future teaching.