A Study Of Prize-winning Teachers’ Pragmatic Knowledge Transmission In Intensive English Classroom

This study is undertaken to investigate the current situation of pragmatic teaching in College English Intensive Class by making an analysis of the videos of ten successful College English teachers in the1st National College English Teaching Contest.The research questions to be addressed in the study are as follows:1) How much time do teachers spend in transmitting pragmatic knowledge in College English Intensive Class?2) What types of pragmatic knowledge are included in College English Intensive Class?3) In what ways do teachers transmit pragmatic knowledge in College English Intensive Class?The study selects ten cases of video-taped Intensive English classroom teaching as an object of investigation. Ten teachers (two male teachers and eight female teachers) are chosen as the participants of this paper. Among the ten teachers, one teacher received both the Outstanding Winner and the first place; three teachers won the second place and the rest of the teachers got the third place.In the video observation part, teachers’pragmatic teaching was explored and described on the basis of the researcher’s intensive and careful observation of the video-taped classroom teaching. All the pragmatic teaching was carefully observed and transcribed into the texts and then calculated based on the research questions.The present study has yielded the following major findings:Firstly, the average time the ten teachers spend on teaching Pragmatic Knowledge is284.5seconds, which takes up23.7%of the total20-minute teaching. T10spends the most time—601seconds (52.4%) in transmitting Pragmatic Knowledge and T8spends the least time—138seconds (11.5%) on Pragmatic Knowledge. This means College English teaching is no longer confined to the language teaching only and the development of pragmatic competence has become one part of College English teaching and learning. However, the time that College English teachers contribute to teaching language (76.3%) is still much more than that to Pragmatic Knowledge, which is again indicative of the language-focused teaching model in College English classroom.Secondly, the pragmatic knowledge that the ten successful College English teachers transmit in class mainly includes Culture and Cooperative Principle with the knowledge of Culture having won all the ten teachers’attention in class. And the knowledge in terms of Cooperative Principle only appears in five teachers’class. As far as Culture is concerned, Deep Culture accounts for the largest percentage (35.2%). Low Culture (25.0%) and Surface Culture (22.4%) rank at the second and the third place. High Culture takes up the smallest amount (17.4%). Another type of Pragmatic Knowledge that the successful English teachers focus on is the knowledge concerning Cooperative Principle, which is not as frequently used by the teachers as the knowledge of Culture. With Cooperative Principle, the successful teachers try to get the students aware of the importance of the four maxims in their use of English.Thirdly, the ten successful College English teachers mainly use two ways to transmit pragmatic knowledge, one is Explicit Instruction and the other is Assigning Tasks. Explicit Instruction (170.5s,59.9%) is more frequently adopted than Assigning Tasks (114.0s,40.1%). By way of Explicit Instruction, the ten College English teachers usually transmit to the students the pragmatic knowledge of Culture and Cooperative Principle. Assigning Tasks in the analysis of the video mainly includes watching Videos, Questions, Making Conversations and Writing Tasks. Videos are more frequently used by the teachers than other kinds of tasks in class.The implications from the findings of the study are as follows:Firstly, College English teachers should be encouraged to develop their own pragmatic competence. If the English teachers want to cultivate students’pragmatic competence which could guarantee the successful communication with native speakers, the English teachers themselves must first have an extensive knowledge of the pragmatic competence.Secondly, College English teachers should be encouraged to provide more pragmatic knowledge in class, making students aware of the cultural differences so that they can reach a higher level of intercultural communication. Adequate input of pragmatic knowledge will contribute to learner’s pragmatic competence.Thirdly, College English teachers should choose authentic materials to raise students’ pragmatic competence. Authentic materials include CDs, videos, cassettes, films and plays, in which natural target language talks are provided. By using the authentic materials, teachers impart the pragmatic knowledge to students in natural models.