A Survey Study Of High School Students' English Pragmatic Competence

With the extent of globalization and the development of technology,the role of English becomes more and more important which requires English learners not only focus on their linguistic competence,but also their pragmatic competence.According to Thomas(1983),pragmatic competence was defined as the ability to use language effectively for a purpose and the ability to understand how to use it in a particular situation.A lot of the researches have been conducted abroad and at home.However,most of the researches focus on teachability of pragmatic competence,pragmatic instruction methods and pragmatic failure and the subjects are mainly college students.The researches on the current situation of senior high school students' pragmatic competence are relatively rare.Hence,this paper aims at finding out the current situation of the senior high school students' pragmatic competence,pragmatic failures the students have and the influential factors of the development of senior high school students' pragmatic competence.The subjects involved in this study were 177 senior high school students from Tianjin No.21 middle school in China.They were asked to finish a questionnaire which was developed by Ran(2006)in Pragmatics: Phenomenon and Analysis and then a supplementary interview was carried out among 10 students.Through quantitative and qualitative analysis of senior high school students' pragmatic competence and pragmatic failure,some influential factors of the students' current situation of pragmatic competence were carried out.Finally,some suggestions were put forward to help improve students' pragmatic competence.The results showed that: firstly,the current situation of senior high school students' pragmatic competence was still serious which needed to be improved and pragmatic failures commonly existed especially in the speech act of gratitude,apology,invitation,request and inquiry and the sociopragmatic competence of the students was better than the pragmalinguistic competence;secondly,although the students had the demands to use English to communicate with others,they didn't know how to improve their English pragmatic competence and the teachers didn't provide the students enough opportunities to train their pragmatic competence which influenced the senior high school students' pragmatic competence;thirdly,some suggestions were proposed: arousing pragmatic awareness of teachers and students,adopting pragmatics-oriented teaching and making full use of English learning and teaching resources to develop senior high school students' pragmatic competence.