A Pragmatic-Discourse Approach To College Students' Oral English From A Pose-method Perspective

The development of advanced English learners' cross-cultural pragmatic competence becomes more and more important with the requirement of the “Belt and Road Initiative” in China.The target language learners need to develop their cross-cultural pragmatic competence and gain useful experience in the use of the target language from their monitoring and analysis of pragmatic failures to achieve pragmatic communication.The study of pragmatic failure has drawn great attention from scholars at home and abroad sinceThomas(1982)first introduced the concept of pragmatic failure.Especially,achievements in the research of speech acts and those of related pragmatic failure studies should have important reference value and significance to the pragmatic teaching in oral English classrooms.This thesis takes the non-English majors' pragmatic competence as example,and begins with the discussion of their pragmatic failures in oral English before it uses theories and methods related to the cross-cultural pragmatic failures,including cooperation principles,politeness principles,face theory,and cross-cultural communication perspectives,to explore the situation of learners' interlanguage pragmatic competence from the perspective of their actual use.It analyzes the features and possible causes of pragmatic failures in the second language learners from the perspective of discourse-pragmatics.Finally,from the “post-method” perspective it discovers that the improvement of pragmatic competence teaching and the cultivation of cross-cultural pragmatic awareness both play an important and active role in English teaching.The research employs both theoretical and practical investigations: first,it pins down the research questions and gives the research an orientation and lays method foundation for the research by reviewing the previous research and the pragmatic theoretical basis to be used,including pragmatic competence,pragmatic failure,cooperation principles,politeness theories,discourse analysis and pragmatic competence assessment,etc.Second,it examines and analyzes college students' pragmatic performance and pragmatic failures as existing in their speech act use by analyzing data that comes from a discourse-completion questionnaire,which involves their performance of greetings,leave-taking,appreciating,apologizing,requesting,suggesting,refusing and other speech acts.Third,discourse-pragmatic analysis based on the students speech act performance in group activity conversations with given situations are carried out,which situations involve various scenes of life,for example,asking strangers for directions,asking teachers for advice,asking neighbors for help,etc..Students' dialogues are recorded,transcribed,and then sorted out as research corpus for discourse-pragmatic analysis to find out about their pragmatic failures in real speech interactions;Moreover,the study here identifies the root causes by comparing the similarities and differences between the expected English forms and the actual Chinese utterances.Fourth,according to the features and causes of pragmatic failures,the research tries to put forward an improved pragmatic teaching plan based on the “post-method”(Richard,2013)pedagogy.That is by carefully providing the learners with analysis of their pragmatic failures,pointing out the difference between the Chinese and English pragmatic principles,thus guiding students to consciously self-evaluate and self-reflect to help them improve their pragmatic competence and “ecologically” learn from their pragmatic failures.At the same time,it gives prospect on the efficiency and importance of pragmatic teaching.The findings of the study can be summarized as follows: 1)the selected college students' pragmatic performance is generally unsatisfactory,with their responses in discourse completion activity and conversational contributions in oral English class show pragmatic failures at both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic levels.2)By analyzing and utilizing pragmatic failures made by students themselves,the input of pragmatic knowledge in the target language will be greatly improved.3)Multi-perspective and multi-level pragmatic theories and methods are helpful for the teachers as researchers to develop deep pragmatics teaching,guiding students' pragmatic acquisitions,and develop the language and cultural input in the “post-method” era,to yield effective pragmatic output.This study is an active exploration of the approach of discourse-pragmatic analysis for the acquisition of English oral competence from the perspective of pragmatics,and promotes the use of pragmatic theory and creative methods in the teaching.This study provides heuristic reference and important implications for the application of pragmatic theories and methods,the new development of applied linguistics,and the promotion of multicultural language acquisition,practice of communication and translation,etc.