A Study Of Foreign Language Pragmatic Teaching In Listening Class

Interlanguage pragmatics is an interdiscipline between pragmatics and second languageacquisition, which studies how the foreign language learners understand and carry outlinguistic actions in a target language, and how they acquire L2pragmatic knowledge. Thetheoretical framework of interlanguage pragmatics is based on pragmatics and secondlanguage acquisition. Speech Act Theory (SAT) and Politeness Principle(PP) are the twowidely discussed theories in studying pragmatic teaching or pragmatic acquisition. Theoriesfrom L2acquisition are the Input hypothesis and the Noticing hypothesis. The formeremphasizes the importance of authentic input for language learners and the latter illustratesthe necessity of learners‘awareness of the features of input. The development ofinterlanguage pragmatics brings the researchers the awareness of the necessity andsignificance of developing the learners‘pragmatic competence.Traditional foreign language teaching mainly focuses on the instruction of linguisticforms, yet neglects the developing of students‘pragmatic competence. The shift in languageteaching began in1980s in China, with transition away from the acquisition of vocabulary&grammar and instead, a focus on the use of language in particular situations. Though it hasbeen proved that it is feasible to teach pragmatics in classroom, pragmatic teaching has notgained enough attention from both the English teachers and language learners. Nowadays,many foreign language teaching curriculum and textbooks in recent years include strongpragmatic components or even adopt a pragmatic approach as their organizing principle.China is lack of the real contextual environment for learning English, so the textbook is stillthe main teaching material. Under this circumstance, how to teach pragmatics in classroomwith the help of textbooks still needs further research.With Speech Act Theory, Politeness Principle and Pragmatic failure as the theoreticalbasis, this thesis is intended to use Contemporary College English Listening Book1as asample to explore and expound the possibility of pragmatic teaching in listening class with atextbook. By analyzing four instances, this thesis demonstrates how to use the languagecorpus in the textbook to conduct pragmatic teaching. Instance1and instance2illustrate the application of Speech Act Theory and Politeness Principle to listening teaching. Instance3and instance4describe how to use the listening material to enhance the students‘understanding of pragmatic failures. This thesis also proposes the suggestions for pragmaticteaching, including teacher‘s role, cultural teaching and listening material compiling.