The Application Of Pragmatic Presupposition To English Writing Teaching

Writing possesses an essential part in English language skills. The traditional writing teaching methodology still attaches great importance to the sentence-level of semantics, such as words and grammar. Teaching writing from pragmatic perspective hasn't attracted enough attention. Pragmatic presupposition is an important concept in pragmatics. It is the addresser's assumption about the mutual knowledge between the participants in the communication and the appropriateness of utterance in certain context, contributing a lot to the arrangement of information in the discourse. Presupposition has the great communicating value and facilitates language expression. The theory of pragmatic presupposition has been studied in many fields. The roles of presupposition in English writing teaching worth further discussion.This experiment is to apply the theory of pragmatic presupposition to English writing teaching of non-English major students. Its main aim is to investigate: whether the theory of pragmatic presupposition will contribute to the improving of students' writing competence? Are the scores of students and the numbers of presupposition triggers positively correlated? What changes in the numbers of presupposition triggers will take place before and after the experiment?The subject of the experiments is two non-English major classes in the Dalian Nationalities University. There are 108 students, including 53 in the experimental class and 55 in the control class. The experimental class adopted explicit and process teaching methods. Apart from the writing instruction in the textbook, the teacher taught the students the theory of pragmatic presupposition directly and led them to apply the theory to their English writing. In the control class, only the process teaching method was used. The teacher focused on teaching the writing skills in the textbook. Pragmatic presupposition is a good way to secure the economy, informativeness and topical coherence of the utterance, contributing more to the organization of the discourse. After one semester's teaching, the scores of the students in both the experimental class and the control class improved tremendously. And the improvement in the experimental class was more obvious. The students in the experimental class used more presupposition triggers, and the correlation between the scores and the numbers of presupposition triggers is positive. The students in the experimental class have a better command of certain presupposition triggers, such as referring expressions, factual verbs, change-of-state verb, and temporal clauses, than the ones in the control class. This experiment applied the theory of pragmatic presupposition to the teaching of non-English major so that the students could arrange the information in the discourse properly. It also proposes some useful suggestions, which is useful to improve student's writing ability.