Develop Students' Pragmatic Competence In Foreign Language Teaching

With the development of modem society, exchange and cooperation among various nations and nationalities are on the increase day by day. Being the main means of communication, foreign languages are gradually taking on an important part in social life. In order to achieve communicative purpose smoothly, foreign language speakers not only need a good knowledge of the language itself ,but also a possession of pragmatic ability, i.e. they can express their own intentions appropriately, understand the conversational implications of others and avoid pragmatic failures during communicative process. Foreign language speakers who have no pragmatic ability couldn't satisfy the needs of the development in our country any more. Therefore, fostering the students' pragmatic ability is now becoming one of the imperative tasks of foreign language teaching in China.Reviewing the history of foreign language teaching in our country, we can find out that many teachers had paid too much attention to the training of students' linguistic competence, and had neglected the fostering of their pragmatic ability. This resulted in the imbalance between linguistic competence and pragmatic ability, namely, most of the students can produce grammatically correct sentences but can not achieve their communicative purpose in real communication.hi view of this situation, this thesis makes a systematic exposition of how to foster the students' pragmatic ability in foreign language teaching process. The whole thesis consists of five parts.Part I explains the definition of pragmatic ability and the main manifestations of pragmatic ability.Part n discusses the significance of fostering the students' pragmatic ability.Part HI expounds the theoretical basis of the thesis.Part IV puts forward some measures for the fostering of students' pragmatic ability: to teach the pragmatic knowledge ; to carry out teachingpractices under situational contexts; to introduce cultural knowledge of the language; to explore and make full use of various teaching resources.Part V gives some suggestions on the problem for foreign language teachers.In conclusion author suggests that the fostering of the students' pragmatic ability is a process of stages and should be proceeded in an orderly way and step by step.