| Pragmatic competence development is a hot issue in the foreign language teaching studies. As an important part of communicative competence, pragmatic competence refers to the learners’ability to use language appropriately in the specific context. The ultimate goal of foreign language teaching is to cultivate students’ability to use target language appropriately in communication, which not only includes linguistic competence enhancement, but also means pragmatic competence development. Research results show that the development of English learners’language competence and pragmatic competence is of imbalance. Pragmatic competence development has lagged behind, and it makes many foreign language users with good grades constantly run into a brick wall in intercultural communication activities. Language as a carrier of cultural transmission is also a kind of culture itself. Language activities of people from different cultural backgrounds demonstrate various characteristics. Thus, cultural differences inevitably result in pragmatic differences.According to schema theory in modern cognitive psychology, schema is the knowledge about the world, events, people and their activities. People process all information with the help of schemata, and interpret, predict and organize the new. Schema provides the basis for new cognition to achieve the purpose of communication. Cultural schema is the existing knowledge about the cultural structure in the human brain, which is of great importance in understanding discourses in intercultural communication. Successful intercultural communication greatly depends on the two communicative parties sharing common cultural schemata to select appropriate linguistic units and effective communicative strategies. Based on schema theory, this research focuses on the strategies to raise the pragmatic competence, aiming at exploring effective ways to help language learners systematically construct cultural schemata in foreign language teaching so as to improve their pragmatic competence and make intercultural communication more smoothly.The thesis first introduces the significance, purpose and organization of the study framework, then expounds the schema theory and its development in details. With the purpose of investigating the current situation of non-English majors’pragmatic competence, a pragmatic competence questionnaire is designed and adopted as the instrument of the experimental research, and the data are analyzed with the help of social science statistical software SPSS19.0. The results of empirical research show that the students’ pragmatic competence is not satisfactory and their deficient cultural schema construction has seriously hindered the development of pragmatic competence. In view of the cultural schema construction problems exposed in the investigation," The Explicit and Implicit Comprehensive Teaching Strategy" is put forward creatively, which is used to improve language learners’ pragmatic competence through activating and constructing their cultural schemata in both explicit and implicit way. And quantitative analysis is applied to verify its feasibility and validity. At the same time, the principles and methods of constructing cultural schema are also discussed in depth. Finally, research implications for foreign language teaching, limitations of the study and suggestions for future research are given.The research results of this thesis are quite significant to the foreign language teaching practice. This research, through the empirical approach, analyzes the root of cultural cognition that influences language learners’ pragmatic competence, and indicates that, by combining target cultural teaching and pragmatic competence development with schema theory, the pragmatic competence development is the ultimate goal of cultural teaching. Furthermore, the question of how to effectively build students’ cultural schema in the foreign language teaching is also discussed, with the purpose-to promote the cultivation of students’ pragmatic competence. |
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