The Effects Of Instruction On Pragmatic Competence Development: Giving Advice In English

Alongside with a paradigm shift from structuralism to functionalism in linguistic studies, and the rapid development of pragmatics as well as the emergence of Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP), the focus of language teaching shifts from learners' linguistic competence towards the comprehensive communicative competence. As an indispensable component in the model of communicative competence, pragmatic competence, especially the issue on how to develop language learners' pragmatic competence, has become a heated topic in the area of language teaching research.Based on both theoretical and empirical results from Interlanguage Pragmatics study, the present study investigates the effects of "pragmatic instruction" on the learners' development of pragmatic competence in EFL settings. In this study, the improvement of learners' pragmatic competence is examined through three aspects: oral production, written production and pragmatic comprehension. Regarding that most relevant empirical studies carried out internationally focus on some frequently-investigated speech acts such as apology, gratitude, refusal, and so on, the present study sets the speech act of advice in English as the target for investigation. The 96 participants involved are first-year college students from two classes in a normal university located in Zhejiang province, where the researcher teaches them English as a compulsory course. The experimental group (EG) is treated with the pragmatic instruction, whereas none on the control group (CG). The data are obtained through pre-test and post-test are analyzed, both qualitatively and quantitatively, in order to examine the effects of instruction on the learners' development in terms of the above-mentioned three facets of pragmatic competence.The result of analysis towards the emails written by participants in both groups indicates that pragmatic competence of the participants in the experimental group (EG) in written production has been improved after the instructional treatment. And the analysis of Discourse Completion Tasks reveals that the instructional treatment plays a positive effect on the development of the EG participants' pragmatic competence in oral production. The analysis of both Multiple Choice Questions and Interviews illustrates that the instructional treatment also have a positive effect on the improvement of the EG participants' pragmatic comprehension. By contrast, the CG participants' performance shows no change in all above-mentioned instruments between pre-test and post-test.Finally, based on the results of the present study, this thesis proposes some pedagogical implications which are helpful to our English teaching. Meanwhile, this thesis concludes some limitations of this study in the hope of providing insights to future research.