A Study On The Cultivation Of Pragmatic Competence In Oral English Teaching In Senior Middle School

High schools in China have not specifically set up oral English curriculum, and the only thing English teachers can do is to encourage students to speak as much English in English classes as possible. Thus, the traditional grammar teaching method results in focusing much of the teachers’attention on the "accuracy" instead of "appropriateness" in the production of the students, which brings about the phenomenon that even the minority of the students who are able to speak fluent English would inevitably encounter culture shock, even communicative failure when they are interacting with English speaking people. This is indeed worthy of our attention and ponders. The lack of pragmatic competence is one important factor which leads to the failure of communication; hence high school students should pay as much attention to developing pragmatic competence as on linguistry. Only when having sufficient culture knowledge and pragmatic competence can the students are able to communicate successfully with foreigners.Based on the English teaching practice, this study integrates the development of pragmatic competence into the oral English classroom teaching. It explores the possible approaches of developing students’pragmatic competence by combining conversational implicative and speech act theory with practice, accordingly trains their oral pragmatic competence, and then improves their ability of cross-cultural communication. After conducting research on the English classes of two senior one parallel classes of Nanjing Foreign Language School through the integrated use of literature analysis, questionnaire, classroom observation and comparative analysis, the author found that the teacher of the control class ignored the development of pragmatic competence in English teaching, and there was no systematic approach and teaching strategies; while the teacher of the experimental class has developed students’pragmatic competence by using the strategy of teaching pragmatic knowledge, importing cultural background, teaching context and using the teaching materials in English teaching. Before teaching practice, analyzing the pragmatic competence of the two classes by SPSS, that is paired T test, where P=0.32is greater than0.005, the difference was not significant. After teaching practice, analyzing the pragmatic competence of the two classes by SPSS, that is paired T test, where P=0.00less than0.005, the difference is significant. The results showed that the pragmatic competence of the students of the experimental class has greatly improved compared with the students of the control class. It indicates that the development of pragmatic competence is effective in the experimental class’s teaching. Through study, the author also found a few issues in English teaching and proposed some optimization proposals as follows:The teachers should improve their professional culture, strengthen their theoretical knowledge study, and thus improve their own quality in pragmatic competence. The teachers should pay more attention in introducing the background knowledge from British and American culture, import pragmatic knowledge in English oral teaching, and compare the differences in pragmatic usage in Chinese-English culture background. The teachers should also try actively to cultivate a favorable language environment, enhance language practice, and add more cultural context in language-learning materials.