A Study On The Correlation Between Teachers’ Classroom Speech Act And Students’ English Pragmalinguistic Competence

Much research has been done abroad on factors affecting the development ofstudents’ pragmatic competence. The studies suggest that many factors can affectstudents’ pragmatic competence, for example, language ability, social and culturalfactors, the time of using the target language, the environment of teaching andlearning, and learners’ personal factors (e.g. motivation, attitude, and personality).As for foreign language teaching in our country, it is an established fact thatteachers pay much attention to the training of students’ linguistic skills, but pay toolittle attention to or even ignore the development of students’ pragmatic competence.The result is that students can not achieve their communicative purpose in realcommunication. In English teaching classroom, teachers’ speech act is a tool oforganizing class activities, a significant means of controlling students’ learningbehavior, and the carrier of language input. What’s more, there are many studies ofstudents’ pragmatic competence and teachers’ speech act, but how to apply pragmaticstudy into teaching, and the study of relationship between students’ pragmatic andteachers’ speech are scarce.This research intends to make an investigation into students’ pragmaticcompetence from the perspective of the correlation between teachers’ classroomspeech act and students’ pragmatic competence. To make a deep and valid study,this thesis will mainly be concerned with pragmalinguistic competence and excludefrom its focus sociopragmatic competence, which include social and cultural factors.The paper first illustrates the theoretic constructs in Austin and Searle’s speech acttheory, pragmatic competence theories and face theory, thus establishing the relevanttheoretic framework necessary for the research. Then the researcher analyzes thecorrelation between teachers’ classroom speech act and students’ pragmalinguisticcompetence. Finally suggestions are provided for teachers to improve students’pragmalinguistic competence.Three research procedures are carried out in the study. Firstly, two English teachers’ classroom speech acts are recorded and analyzed, which are classified intogreeting, directive, asking questions, representative, estimate in order to know theirrespective percentage of distribution in the teachers’ total classroom speechperformance. The two teachers’ indirect classroom speech acts are also analyzed.Then, a questionnaire with questions related to the above five-group classification aswell as indirect speech act is given to students to test their pragmalinguisticcompetence and to find the correlation between teachers’ classroom speech act andstudents’ pragmalinguistic competence. Lastly, a questionnaire is presented to someteachers to find out their attitudes towards pragmatic competence teaching.The findings of the study are as follows:(1)Teachers’ classroom speech act has a positive correlation with students’pragmalinguistic competence.(2)Middle school English teachers’ awareness of cultivating students’pragmalinguistic competence needs to be improved.(3) Middle school English teachers’ classroom indirect speech act has a positivecorrelation with students’ indirect pragmalinguis competence. On average, studentshave poor pragmalinguistic competence in terms of indirect speech act.Based on the findings, the paper lays stress on the application of speech acttheory to English teaching, and the necessity of enhancing students’ pragmalinguisticcompetence. Meanwhile, teachers should enrich their classroom speech content andstructure from the perspectives of greeting, directive, asking questions, representative,estimate and indirect speech. Teachers should accumulate teaching experience toattract students’ interest to achieve the final goal of improving students’pragmalinguistic competence.