An Investigation On Current Situation Of Pragmatic Learning And Pragmatic Competence Of Senior High School Students

Briefly speaking, pragmatic competence refers to the ability of using language appropriately toachieve a specific purpose and to understand language in context, which is an essential component ofcommunicative competence. Pragmatic competence can be divided into pragma-linguistic competence andsocio-pragmatic competence. The development of pragmatic competence plays an important part in Englishteaching. Deficiency in pragmatic competence is bound to lead to pragmatic failures.The present study aims at investigating the current situation of pragmatic teaching and learning insenior high schools and students'pragmatic competence in such circumstances.First, two questionnaires were administrated to 207 senior high school students and 15 Englishteachers to explore the current situation of pragmatic teaching and learning in Qingyang N0.1 middleschool. The results showed that the pragmatic teaching had been ignored seriously. The majority of teacherswere lack of pragmatic teaching awareness and failed to integrate culture teaching into teaching process,which in turn resulted in insufficient classroom intercultural activities. In addition, students were of lowmotivation of pragmatic learning and lack of pragmatic input and so forth.Second, an English pragmatic competence test which was selectively taken from He Ziran and YanZhuang's study was conducted to the same students to examine their pragmatic competence. After statisticsanalysis, the following conclusions have been drawn: senior high school students'pragmatic competence islow on the whole; there is no significant difference between the students in different grades; there is nosignificant correlation between their pragmatic competence and their English scores of last CollegeEntrance Examination to the students in senior grade three. These revealed that the development oflinguistic competence and pragmatic competence of senior high school students is incongruous, with thelatter one falling greatly behind the former one. To make up for contingency of the test, and further verifythe accuracy of the results, the author conducted a role-play test. The results were consistent to the previoustest done by the test paper. The author discovered there were pragmatic failures in greeting, addressing,speech act of invitation, response to compliment etc. through the discourse analysis.When it comes to pragmatic failures, the author arranged and grouped pragmatic failure into threecategories based on Thomas's framework of pragmatic failure, namely, pragma-linguistic failure,soico-pragmatic failure and pragama-behavioral failure. The first two categories were considered from theverbal perspective, and the last one was accounted for from the non-verbal point of view. Dividing pragmatic failures into three types would be more generalized and complete.The students'low level of pragmatic competence could not be separated from the disappointingcurrent situation of pragmatic teaching and learning. Some teaching measures of cultivating students'pragmatic competence were introduced. Students'low pragmatic competence can be overcome throughintegrating cultural teaching in the teaching process, employing more pragmatically-centered classroomactivities and providing more authentic materials. At the same time, students themselves should set upproper English learning goals and bring the second classroom into full play to achieve self-development inpragmatic competence.