Pragmatic Teaching In High Schools In China

Pragmatics studies "meaning in context".There're two crucial concepts in the pragmatic theories-"meaning" and "context".With the development of the researches in pragmatics and second/foreign language(SL/FL) teaching,scholars begin to incorporate pragmatics into the teaching of SL/FL and explore the teachabilty of pragmatic knowledge and teaching approaches.It's proved that pragmatic knowledge is teachable and instruction/input through classroom is beneficial in improving learners' pragmatic competence.Generally,a language learner should have two kinds of competences:grammatical competence and pragmatic competence.The former one relates to the correctness of the language forms,while the later one relates to the appropriateness of language use.They are of the same importance.The aim of teaching pragmatics is to develop the students' pragmatic competence both in understanding meaning correctly and expressing meaning appropriately in context.Pragmatic knowledge is teachable.It's necessary to teach English pragmatics in high schools in China.Comparing the studies from abroad and in China,the studies abroad are mainly based on SLA (Second Language Acquisition) theories and are carried out in the ESL(English as a Second Language) environment.Many researching results come from the scholars' teaching experiments or teaching practices.While in China,much attention is paid to the introduction of the theories and results from abroad,and there's a lack of China's own theories and teaching practices which are consistent with the English teaching reality of China.Though some investigations are done to test students' pragmatic competence,few attention is directed to the students in high schools.So far,few people talk about the problem of how to teach pragmatics in high schools in China specifically.When teaching pragmatics,we have to decide what pragmatic knowledge can be taught and how to teach the knowledge to the high-school students.According to the classification of the two kind of pragmatic knowledge——pragmalinguistic knowledge and sociopragmatic knowledge,the contents of pragmatic teaching include socio-cultural knowledge,contextual knowledge,politeness strategies, speech acts,pragmatic routines,etc.Teachers can teach the pragmatic knowledge either in an 'ameliorated' way or a 'revolutionary' way.The difference is whether to add some pragmatic information to the traditional grammatical teaching contents or to teach pragmatics specially and systematically.However,there may be some shortcomings and constraints in this study.Implications and suggestions for further research are also made based on the study.