Research On High School Students' Interlanguage Pragmatic Competence

With the development of language research, researchers have paid more and more attention to language use, functions and so on. The turning of the research makes the focus of foreign language teaching turn to developing the learners' ability of language use gradually. Researchers have done some research into pragmatic competence on different samples. With the help of former researchers and according to the theories of interlanguage, the author of this thesis thinks that the interlanguage pragmatic competence may contain 5 sections. They are the competence of pragmatic comprehension of interlanguage, pragmatic production, comprehension of pragmatic transfer, telling the pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure and realizing pragmatic effects in cross-cultural. Then with the reference of the factors of interlanguage pragmatic competence and former research instruments, the author designed a questionnaire to know high school students' interlanguage pragmatic competence. In the research, the author chose 208 students as the samples, including students in senior Grade 1 and Grade 3.After statistics are collected and analyzed by computer, we've got the following conclusions. Firstly, high school students' interlanguage pragmatic competence is low on the whole, because the average is 25.4315 while the total is 50. And there is no obvious difference between the students in different grades (t=-1 .933; p=0.055). That is to say, their interlanguage pragmatic competence isn't improving at the same rate as their language competence develops. Secondly, to the students in senior Grade 1 there is a low mutual relation between their interlanguage pragmatic competence and their marks of the high school entrance test (r=0.436). According to the results of the research and the factual situation, I have done a teaching experiment lasting a term using the teaching model of explicit instruction to improve their interlanguage pragmatic competence, at the same time with the help of other ways. At last I did a post-test. After comparing the results with the pre-test's, I found there is an obvious difference between them (t=4.456; p=0.000). Research done in this thesis has done a helpful tentative on knowing and improving the high school students' interlanguage pragmatic competence.