A Study On Reading Comprehension Questions In National Matriculation English Test From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Competence

Listening,speaking,reading and writing are considered the basic skills of English learning.In the EFL context,listening and reading are important inputs in English teaching,which directly affect the teaching efficiency.As there is no authentic context of learning English in China,learning English is a great challenge to both the learners and teachers.For a long time,teachers have spent a lot of time in doing research on students reading,but the result does not sound good.In New Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools issued in 2017,there are new requirements for English teaching.Of the requirements,the training of students’ “key competencies” is put forward in the course of English teaching,which include language competence,cultural awareness,thinking quality and learning ability.The teaching content about students’ English competence in the new English curriculum has been upgraded from five aspects—language skills,language knowledge,emotional attitude,learning strategies and cultural awareness to six aspects—context,discourse,language knowledge,cultural knowledge,language skills and learning strategies.When teachers teach the students English,they not only pay attention to phonetics,vocabulary,grammar,function and topic as they traditionally did in the past,but they also focus on discourse and pragmatics.That is to say,English teaching should lay more emphasis on the students’ appropriate use of English in context rather than just the aim of passing the exams.Based on this understanding,the author is intended to make an investigation of pragmatic components in reading comprehension of National Matriculation English Test(hereafter NMET)and students’ pragmatic competence in accomplishing reading comprehension questions.The investigation is carried out in two main parts.First,the author has made a pragmatic analysis of the reading comprehension questions of 68 reading passages selected from 2011 to 2018 NMET in order to answer such questions as: 1)What is the proportion of pragmatic components in reading comprehension of NMET? 2)What kind of reading comprehension questions is there in the NMET?The second part of the study is to investigate the students’ pragmatic competence in reading comprehension with a case study of the school where the author is working.This part is intended to answer the following questions: 3)How is the students’ pragmatic competence in reading comprehension in the test? 4)What aspects of pragmatic competence do they need to improve in reading comprehension?The study has found that 51% of the questions examined in the reading section of NMET are testing students’ pragmatic competence while 49% of the questions are detailed questions which are about the facts in the passages.According to the frequency of the question type in NMET,questions involved in pragmatic competence are: inference,guessing words,main idea,the author’s attitude,the author’s intention and the genre of the passage.The investigation of the students in doing reading comprehension shows that students are most likely to lose points in the questions of testing the main idea of the passage,the ability of guessing word and making inference from the passage.It suggests that students lack contextual and pragmatic awareness so that they cannot understand the deep meaning of the passage or the author’s real intention of writing the passage.The above results obtained in the study of pragmatic components in reading comprehension of NMET may provide the following implications for senior high school English teaching.First of all,it is greatly important to have a better understanding of the teaching requirements in English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools and to take them as the guide or principle in teaching practice.In class,teachers not only focus on grammar instruction,but also the knowledge of pragmatics.At the same time,it is vital for FL teachers to enrich their pragmatic knowledge.Secondly,it is necessary for teachers to enrich the types of questions in reading teaching,not only factual questions but also analytical questions to cultivate students’ pragmatic ability.Finally,it is also necessary for teachers of senior high school to supplement reading materials and to get students familiar with the structural features of different genres.