A Study Of Senior Middle School Students' Pragmatic Weaknesses And Its Implications For English Classroom Teaching

As a focal topic in cross-cultural communication and interlanguage pragmatics, many studies on pragmatic failure have been done by linguists at home and abroad. But the author finds that most of these studies have taken college and university students as their subjects and few have been carried out on middle school students. This may be due to the fact that it is easier to elicit data from English learners of higher linguistic proficiency (张彬, 2005: 34). At the same time, it is also found that almost all Chinese researchers have classified as pragmatic failure the subjects' wrong choices or judgments elicited with questionnaires for pragmatic failure. For a better understanding of the nature of pragmatic competence, the author proposes that these elicited responses are better classified as pragmatic weaknesses since they are not instances of actual pragmatic failure in the real cross-cultural communication.This thesis aims to find out middle school students' pragmatic weaknesses in cross-cultural classroom practice. Three questions are to be investigated: 1) What is the current situation of senior middle school students' pragmatic awareness? 2) What is the current situation of senior middle school students' pragmatic competence? 3) What pragmatic weaknesses may senior middle school students demonstrate in cross-cultural classroom practice?Two tests in the form of questionnaire are adopted to elicit data in this study. The two groups of subjects are selected from a provincial key middle school ~ one group consisting of 36 senior-one students and the other consisting of 38 senior-three students. The results of Questionnaire I on pragmatic awareness show that both the groups' pragmatic awareness is very unsatisfactory. The fact that the senior-three students' grammatical awareness is higher than that of the senior-one students and senior-one students' pragmatic awareness is higher than that of the senior-three students indicates that foreign language learners who have higher grammatical awareness cannot guarantee concomitantly higher pragmatic awareness. The results of Questionnaire II on pragmatic competence reveal that there is no significant difference between the two groups on the whole. The senior-three students who are more grammatically proficient do only slightly better than those senior-one students who are less grammatically proficient.In other words, pragmatic competence and grammatical competence do not develop simultaneously; a learner who is proficient in grammatical competence is not necessarily proficient in pragmatic competence. Hence, apart from developing students' grammatical competence, pragmatic competence cultivation is of great necessity, of which pragmatic awareness raising plays a crucial role.From the above research findings, some insights into English language teaching (ELT) can be drawn as pedagogical implications. Students' pragmatic weaknesses in cross-cultural classroom practice, which are mainly attributed to their weak pragmatic competence, can be overcome through enhancing culture teaching, incorporating pragmatics into teaching, innovating teaching techniques, and meanwhile encouraging teachers' self-development.The present study is significant for ELT, which is aimed to foster learners' cross-cultural communicative competence, in particular pragmatic competence. Further, it can help the reform of ELT in China by discovering students' pragmatic weaknesses and providing feasible solutions for the cultivation and improvement of students' pragmatic competence.