An Action Research On The Cultivation Of English Pragmatic Competence Of Junior High School Students Under The Background Of Core Literacy

The English Curriculum Standard for Compulsory Education(2017 Edition)points out that the general goal of English curriculum in compulsory education is to enable students to form a preliminary comprehensive language ability through English learning.However,English teaching in this stage in China still mainly focuses on students' acquisition of language knowledge,neglecting the cultivation of students' pragmatic competence.This leads to the lack of pragmatic competence and frequent pragmatic failures of most students.It is not conducive to their cross-cultural communication in the future.Therefore,some teaching designs should be adopted to improve students' pragmatic competence.Based on the core competence of English subject and the learning theory of constructivism,this study focuses on 45 students and 4 English teachers from a junior high school in Yutai,Jining,Shandong Province.The study investigates the current situation and existing problems of students' pragmatic competence in the form of pragmatic competence test,questionnaire and semi-structured interview.Then some teaching designs that pay attention to the cultivation of students' pragmatic competence have been carried out through the implementation of two rounds of action research on the subjects.The purpose of this thesis is to answer the following three questions:(1)What is the current situation of English pragmatic competence of the junior high school students? What are the problems?(2)How to carry out classroom teaching with pragmatic competence as the core?(3)Is the pragmatic teaching effective in improving students' pragmatic competence? After analyzing and discussing the research data,the following findings are obtained:(1)The overall level of pragmatic competence of the students in this class is low and there is a large gap in pragmatic competence among the students.Students' pragmatic failures occur frequently and occur in all kinds of speech acts.This is mainly due to the fact that teachers in the school do not pay attention to the cultivation of students' pragmatic competence and they lack pragmatic awareness.They often ignore students' individual differences and can not make classroom teaching for all students and teachers' own pragmatic competence is not high.Students are accustomed to traditional foreign language teaching methods and cramming knowledge.They ignore the expression and use of language,and the students do not have a high ability of autonomous learning.They seldom dabble in knowledge about cultural and pragmatic differences between China and foreign countries.(2)Through the reflection and adjustment of two rounds of action research,the pragmatic teaching model is finally adopted,which is composed of providing meta-language information,providing authentic situational input,practice,giving feedback,optimizing the teaching of reading to promote students' understanding and expression,and strengthening the teaching of cultural awareness.(3)The explicit pragmatic teaching design carried out in the first round of the action research and the teaching of cultural awareness and the optimized teaching of reading and writing added in the second round of action research have promoted the improvement of students' pragmatic competence to a certain extent.Although students' pragmatic competence has improved to a certain extent through this study,we still need to explore how to train and improve students' pragmatic competence systematically through various types of classes.