Vocational College Students' Pragmatic Competence: Problems And Strategies

Pragmatic problems lying with Chinese learners of English manifest themselves mainly in the following aspects:(1) Too much emphasis is placed on accuracy rather than on appropriateness;(2) Too much emphasis is put on acquisition of linguistic forms rather than their communicative functions;(3) There exist some serious pragmatic failures(including both pragmalinguistic failures and sociopragmatic failures).These problems are even worse in Vocational College Students.Investigation made into the status quo of pragmatic competence of the VCSs in Changsha area on the basis of the findings of the theories and practice of pragmatic competence at home and abroad has revealed that there exist some differences between VCSs and Undergraduate Students(USs) as far as their pragmatic competence is concerned.In the pragmatic test,although the average scores of both the USs' and the VCSs' pragmatic competence as a whole are not so satisfactory,the former's approach the dividing line of 60(59.2667) and the latter's(50.2857) are almost 10 points(in terms of 100 points) below.That is,the level of VCSs' pragmatic competence as a whole is significantly inferior to that of the USs'.As for the VCSs' pragmatic competence,their pragmalinguistic competence is even weaker than their sociopragmatic competence.The reasons why Chinese learners of English are weak in pragmatic competence involve the following five aspects:lack of linguistic knowledge,inadequacy of intercultural knowledge,deficiency of linguistic input,negative pragmatic transfer and influence from traditional English teaching pedagogy.VCSs' pragmatic competence can be categorized as mainly including pragmatic awareness and knowledge,speech acts,communicative competence, sociocultural ability and so on.Factors for their pragmatic acquisition are roughly classified into individual and contextual ones.Individual factors involve linguistic competence,motivation,communicative status, communicative needs,fossilization,noticing and so on.Contextual factors consist of L1 transfer,accessibility of input,influence of instruction and so on. On the basis of above analysis a suggested teaching model for developing VCSs' pragmatic compentence and a pragmatic teaching experiment have shown that explicit instruction plays a greater role in developing VCSs' pragmatic competence compared with implicit instruction.This model entails some implications for vocational college English teaching.The prerequisite to develop and improve VCSs' pragmatic competence is raising their pragmatic consciousness,advocating communicative language teaching and increasing pragmatic input.The approaches to increasing pragmatic input include using the English language as a teaching medium,bringing the English teachers' role into full play,tapping textbooks' pragmatic potential,encouraging interactional communication and exploiting outside-classroom pragmatic input.