On The Cultivation Of College Students’ Interlanguage Pragmatic Competence Under Explicit Instruction

Nowadays, more and more scholars and researchers begin to pay attention tosecond language acquisition, then a new branch "interlanguage pragmatics" raised up.Teachers gradually put highly focus on the cultivation of students’ pragmaticsknowledge and pragmatics competence which are also important in interlanguagepragmatics. The research method, the teaching environment and the teaching effect areall the main parts in daily research. Among all these teaching instructions, the explicitinstruction is paid more attention. So the explicit instruction may also be an importantresearch domain for college English teaching. This study analyses the cultivation ofinterlanguage pragmatic competence under explicit instruction from the angle ofEnglish compliment and compliment responses. The compliment s classifications usedin this study is based on Manes and Wolfson s classification, and they divide it into ninetypes. The compliment responses classifications are based on Holmes finding. Holmesdivided compliment responses into Accept, Reject and Evade which has3or4microclassifications. Meanwhile, the researcher also added the Combination response strategyinto the classification of compliment responses for the consideration of the actualcondition.The research participants are154students who are all from institute of science andtechnology in Jiangxi Normal University of Science and Technology, but there are only148valid results among them. They are enrolled in two different majors, namely thoseof Art design and Music Major. The instructor arranged the Art Design majors to be theexplicit group, since they are more hardworking in class and can have better researcheffect as explicit group. The Music majors are treated as the implicit group. Theresearch takes6weeks which lasts40minutes each week. This study uses pretest andposttest methods, then adopts DTC questionnaire as data collection method. Ourresearch listed some research questions.1) Is explicit instruction really effective inincreasing the use of first three compliment strategies which was found by Manes andWolfson, and decreasing the use of the latter six strategies as other researchers finding?2) Is explicit instruction really effective in making the using percentage of first threecompliment strategies which was found by Manes and Wolfson close to85%, thenumber of which is also found by Manes and Wolfson?3) As for compliment responses,is explicit instruction really effective in decreasing Accept strategy and increasingEvade strategy and other strategies?4) Are there any other findings in this research? The result shows that:1) The using of the former three compliment strategiesfound by Manes and Wolfson increased and the other6decreased. The changingcondition of the implicit group is less obvious.2) The explicit instruction is reallyeffective in keeping the using percentage of the first three compliment strategies whichwas found by Manes and Wolfson close to85%, the number of which is also found byManes and Wolfson.3) After training the participants in the explicit group do decreaseAccept strategy and increase Evade, Reject and Combination strategies. The changingcondition of the implicit group is less obvious.4) we still find that among he Acceptstrategy there are92.6%participants used “appreciation token”, and the AppreciationToken is exactly “Thank you” or “Thank you+others”. Through explicit instructions,the students notice there are other types of Accept strategy, not just this “Thank you”type “appreciation token”. Because of this, the students reduce its using condition. Theimplicit group doesn t change a little.5) Among the4sub-classifications of Acceptstrategies, the explicit group participants decreased the using of Downgrading Utterancestrategies after training, while the implicit group increases the using. It would be good ifthe article can have some helpfulness for the future interlanguage pragmatic teachingand the cultivation of interlanguage pragmatic competence for the purpose of givingnew angles to improve teaching standard and teaching quality.