The Effect Of Explicit Instruction On The Development Of English Pragmatic Competence Of Vocational College English Learners

Language communicative ability is an important target to improve thelanguage teaching and learning ability. Pragmatic competence is a significant partof the communicative ability. It is the key to improve language communicativeability. In foreign language learning, learners’ pragmatic ability is not necessarilystrong though their language ability is highly efficient. He or she can notdefinitely succeed in cross-cultural communication though their knowledge of thelanguage is profound. Since the1980s, interlanguage pragmatic has rose anddeveloped. As a cross discipline of pragmatics and second language acquisition,research of the interlanguage pragmatics most focuses on the language behaviorstrategy of non-native speakers when they use and develop target language.Subjects which are focused on the description of non-native speakers’performance have been conducted by some empirical research, aiming to find outthe similarities and differences between native speakers and non-native speakers.The use of the speech act is an important manifestation of pragmaticcompetence. The speech act of refusal is one of the significant parts ofinterlanguage pragmatics. The comparative study of the speech act of refusal is ahot topic of pragmatic study. But the amount of pedagogical research on refusalstrategies is relatively small. King and Silver (1993), Morrow (1995), Kondo(2001) and Silva (2003)’s study has made some progress, but the design of thestudy is not perfect: the teaching time is relatively short; some research has noapparent effect; the researching method is relatively simple; Explicit teaching is the main teaching method of the research; little research has focused on the fourtypes of refusal strategy.The present study is aiming to teach students the proper use of refusalstrategies. The refusal pragmatic competence which is presented by QingdaoE-star college students is researched. Classroom teaching approach is used toresearch the effects of explicit teaching approach on improving language learners’pragmatic ability. This thesis focuses on the following questions:(1) Whether the explicit teaching method makes effects on improving theexperimental group’s refusal strategies or not?(2) Whether the explicit teaching method has the same effect as the implicitteaching method in terms of improving students’ refusal strategies?Sixty-one first year students of Qingdao E-star College participated in thisexperiment. They were divided into the explicit teaching group and the implicitinstruction group. Teacher provided not only the teaching materials, explanationof the refusal strategies but also the feedback. The implicit instruction group onlyreceived the learning materials. Data is collected by using backgroundquestionnaire, and open discourse complete testing (DCT), and analyzed bystatistical tools. The analysis of experimental results shows that: experimentalgroup improves significantly in making appropriate request without error; theexplicit teaching plays a significant role on the improvement of pragmaticconscious.Based on the teaching of refusal speech act for vocational college students,this paper found that: on the basis of past research, this paper implementspragmatic teaching for vocational college students and provide research dataaiming to appeal researchers to keep a watchful eye on the ignorance of pragmaticteaching and the long-term teaching concepts of more concerned with grammarand vocabulary teaching. This research will facilitate foreign language teaching.