A Study On The English Majors’pragmatic Competence

The ultimate goal of language teaching and learning contains not only thewell command of language rules but also the capability to use the language inauthentic communicational situations, which is defined as pragmaticcompetence. However, English learners in China attach too much importance inlanguage accuracy and neglect the fluency. Meanwhile, they place too muchemphasis in the knowledge of language itself and ignore the functional oflanguage. As a result, many English learners in China cannot open their mouthto speak English or cannot accomplish a successful communication even asEnglish majors and the pragmatic failure rise accordingly.As for the study in the field of pragmatic, the scholars in China have donea lot since1980’s and most of them focused on the pragmatic competencecultivation and the course of pragmatic failure. Based on the classification ofpragmatic competence, the notion of pragmatic failure, and the theory aboutpragmatic-oriented teaching method, the writer intent to raise English learners’pragmatic awareness, develop their pragmatic competence and finally to reach awin-win result for both language teacher and learners.70college English majors and70vocational English majors from Xi’anPolytechnic University composed the subjects of present study. The first stage ofthis empirical research is the analysis of the result of pragmatic competence testand linguistic competence test from different length schooling students in orderto figure the relationship of linguistic proficiency and pragmatic competence.And then, the70vocational English majors were divide into control group and experimental group who would help the researcher to conduct a teachingexperiment which is aimed to develop their pragmatic competence. This stagelast one semester and the data collected from the pre-test, post-test and interviewguaranteed the validity and reliability of the present study.Accordingly, the three hypotheses are put forward: Firstly, the students whocan get a high score in linguistic proficiency test can also do well in pragmaticcompetence test. Secondly, subjects’ pragmatic competence can be improvedthrough pragmatic-orient teaching method. Thirdly, the progress they made is notabsolutely which means just some aspect of pragmatic can be improved whilesome others cannot improved from teaching practice.With the data processed by SPSS17.0, the conclusions are got as follows:First of all, learners’ linguistic competence is the basic element for theirpragmatic competence. However, the progress of linguistic proficiency cannotbring the improvement of pragmatic competence which means that linguisticcompetence is the necessary condition but not the sufficient condition forpragmatic competence. Besides, the result of post-test demonstrated thatlearners’ pragmatic competence can indeed be developed frompragmatic-oriented teaching method. However, the improvement is limited andrelative rather than absolute because some aspects can and some others cannot.Finally, we can infer that the aspects involved language function can beadvanced obviously such as politeness principles and from of language formality.Meanwhile, there are some sides which related to the different thinking modeand the point of view for the world such as metaphor and culture aspect isdifficult for language teachers to advance them through teac hing.Therefore, according to these findings, the writer believed that thepragmatic-oriented teaching method is effective and worth popularized incollege English teaching.