A Study Of Developing High School Students' Pragmatic Competence Through Cultural Elective Course

With "The Belt and Road Initiative(BRI)" proposed,it is extremely important to carry out culture teaching and cultivate pragmatic competence.The English Curriculum Standard(2017)for Senior High School clearly stipulates that in addition to compulsory English courses,elective courses should also be added to senior high school English courses.Compared with the schools in first-tier cities,culture teaching is not given enough attention in the schools of remote areas,which leads to the lack of pragmatic competence development.Elective courses have become increasingly popular in schools such as Beijing and Shanghai,while it is still new in county high schools.So how to take advantage of culture elective course to make students to learn more cultural knowledge and at the same time cultivate good pragmatic competence under the pressure of college entrance examination is the main direction of English teaching research at present.The researcher has carried on the culture elective course teaching based on "theme,contrast,practice" for one semester to one of the classes,which are selected from grade two in the county level demonstration high school,aiming to verifying the effect of the course to improve students' pragmatic competence.Three research questions were raised and answered in the study.(1)What is the present situation of County Senior Middle School students'pragmatic competence in the aspects of correctness of language expression and so on?(2)What is the effect of culture elective course on students' pragmatic competence,and what are the major aspects of the improvement?(3)What are the advantages and disadvantages of elective courses in terms of teachers' teaching and teaching effect?The results show that:firstly,the county high school students have low pragmatic competence,and there are a lot of pragmatic failures in common communication situations.Students have great shortcomings in the correctness of language expression,the mastery of pragmatic principles and the expression of Chinese culture.Typical mistakes include translating word by word and confusing Chinese and Western social rules,etc.Moreover,the scores on the correctness of pragmatic expressions are relatively low,which indicates that the students lack oral English training very much.Secondly,the culture elective course has a great effect on improving students' pragmatic competence.In particular,the most obvious improvement is related to pragmatic principles,which suggests that many second language pragmatic features and knowledge is teachable.Thirdly,on the whole,students are satisfied with the elective course,but are not completely satisfied with the relationship between elective courses and compulsory courses and the cooperation with group members in classroom activities.At the same time,the students put forward some views on the class rigor,interactivity,diversity of activities and so on,which are written in the questionnaires.Based on the conclusion of the study,this paper puts forward some suggestions aiming to improve students' pragmatic competence.These suggestions include 1)balancing the English learning goals and cultivating students' pragmatic cultural awareness.2)taking advantage of cultural theme and its contrast to improve the effectiveness of teaching.3)managing class activities and consolidating lessons,so as to enhance the influence of culture teaching.