Middle School English Teachers’ Pragmatic Competence:a Survey

As a major research field in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP), the research on pragmatic competence has been attracting more and more attention. In China, this kind of study doesn’t begin until1980, and most studies focus on students’ English pragmatic competence. Based on previous researches, the present study focuses on English teachers’ pragmatic competence in Senior High school. It aims to recognize the general situation of English teachers’pragmatic competence in the surveyed region, investigating differences in pragmatic competence between rural area English teachers and their urban counterparts, and how pragmatic competence correlates to grammatical competence. Accordingly, the research questions are as follows:(1) What’s the current situation of the English teachers’pragmatic competence?(2) Is there any correlation between English teachers’ pragmatic competence and their grammatical competence?(3) Is there difference between the English teachers’ pragmatic competence in urban and rural areas.The subjects of the present study are114English teachers coming from8senior middle schools in Luoyang, Henan Province. And all the8schools are chosen randomly. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are employed in the study. The two instruments used in the research are DSATs questionnaire and interviews respectively. And the data of the research is computed and analyzed by SPSS15.0.Through analyses, the findings of the study can be summarized as follows:firstly, the subjects’ overall pragmatic competence is at a low level. And the score of English teachers’ pragmatic competence is lower than their grammatical competence, showing that subjects’ ability of language use is poorer than their ability of grammar. Secondly, subjects’ grammatical competence is negatively correlated with their pragmatic competence. That is, the better English grammatical competence the poorer English pragmatic competence the subjects have. However, the correlation coefficient is low and not significant. Finally, there exists a significant difference between the urban teachers and rural teachers in pragmatic competence, the urban English teachers are slightly better than rural ones. In addition, the results of the interview reveal that the English teachers in senior middle school have limited pragmatic knowledge, and they always ignore the cultivation of students’ pragmatic competence.It is hoped that the study can make the English teachers recognize their pragmatic competence, promoting them to have reflection on the development of such competence. Meanwhile, the results of this study hope to draw attention from organizations in charge of education, thus adding the pragmatic knowledge training during the further education. The present study has its limitation, naturally. In order to get a better understanding, some further studies are needed.