Developing Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Competence In College English Instruction

Developing students'cross-cultural pragmatic competence has been acknowledged to be a major goal of current college English instruction in China. What cross-cultural pragmatic competence is and how college students may achieve this have become issues of major concern. Yet, no consensus has been reached even today on the definition of Cross-cultural Pragmatic Competence. The author of this thesis proposes her understanding of Cross-cultural Pragmatic Competence and possible approaches to developing this competence.Drawing on a test-and-interview-based survey of students'pragmatic failure in English learning at Shanghai Institute of Technology, and illustrating two kinds of pragmatic errors as well as their causes with a great number of examples, the author points out that the key elements of developing students'cross-cultural pragmatic competence lie in developing their cross-cultural awareness and pragmatic competence, towards which six feasible approaches are adopted: introducing pragmatic and cultural knowledge to students; heightening students'cross-cultural pragmatic awareness; teaching speech acts and their functions; teaching implicature interpretation skills; selecting teaching materials; and providing authentic contexts for students.In college English instruction, teachers should not ignore students'cross-cultural pragmatic failures, but correcting their errors does not necessarily help them acquire their cross-cultural pragmatic competence. The author also proposes that teachers should foster students'interest in culture and pragmatics and enable them to observe pragmatic phenomena in daily life, to find pragmatic differences between two cultures, and further to correct pragmatic errors and develop cross-cultural pragmatic competence by themselves.