A Study On The Application Of Pragmatic Presupposition To College English Reading Teaching

Pragmatic presupposition refers to the predefined prerequisite and language background knowledge, which is implied in indirect statements through the language communication. Connected with addressors and other closely related factors, pragmatic presupposition is a kind of language phenomenon with the properties of instability, changeability, depending on the context. In recent years, the study on pragmatic presupposition has gained much more attention by many linguists and language teaching researchers, which has been applied in language teaching. The research into the application of pragmatic presupposition to language teaching mainly focuses on listening and writing teaching, but scantly found on reading teaching. As a cognitive process of reasoning, reading provides readers with a process to exchange information with authors. Readers are able to reason author’s intention, attitude and idea according to their existing state of knowledge. Pragmatic presupposition is a premise of reasoning, revealing deeply in discourse, which is not assertive information. Thus, it allows readers to reason the implicit information in the discourse by using pragmatic presupposition and context.This study combines pragmatic presupposition and English reading teaching of non-English majors with the method of experimental contrast analysis, data statistics analysis and questionnaires, which is an attempt to apply pragmatic presupposition to reading teaching to improve the quality of college English reading teaching and investigate the effect of direct instruction in pragmatic presupposition on students’ reading ability. Two natural classes are chosen as subjects in School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Dalian Jiaotong University. The whole subjects are62(each class is31) sophomores, who receive a period of twelve weeks’ experimental research. The instruction in pragmatic presupposition is only presented in the EC, whereas the CC receives normal reading teaching. The subjects in the EC and CC with the same English teacher follow the same teaching steps and teaching materials. According to the scores in the pre-test, the subjects’ reading proficiency levels in the two classes have no significant difference, so these two classes could be chose as the compared classes at the beginning of the experiment. At the end of the experiment, all the subjects in the two classes participate in a reading comprehension test on the evaluation of students’ reading ability. The writer collects and arranges the data under the help of SPSS16.0, analyzing the data with tools of Independent Samples Test and Paired Samples Test. Then all the subjects in EC are asked to do a questionnaire which is used to investigate the effect of instruction in pragmatic presupposition on students’reading abilities and on solving different types of reading questions’ abilities. Through the study it can be found that college English reading teaching combining the pragmatic presupposition knowledge can help students improve their reading abilities. Based on the statistical analysis, it shows that college students dealing with the inference questions and the author’s attitude questions in reading comprehension with the knowledge of pragmatic presupposition is much more effective than other types of questions.