A Case Study Of The Instructional Design For Developing Students’ Pragmatic Competence In High School English Teaching

With the rapid development of the pragmatics, the focus of language teaching has shifted from cultivating students’linguistic competence to fostering students’ pragmatic competence. Pragmatic competence, especially how to cultivate learners’ pragmatic competence springs up. A great number of researches have been conducted abroad and at home. However, most of the researches focus on putting forward how to cultivate students’ pragmatic competence in theory. Only a few of the studies put the development of students’ pragmatic competence into practice. Hence, this paper aims at putting the cultivation of students’pragmatic competence into practice. A specific instructional design was conducted and evaluated to get some implications for developing students’ pragmatic competence in reality.The participants are students of Class Two from Grade 10 in one of the key senior high school in Nankai District in Tianjin.In light of the theories of pragmatic instruction proposed by previous studies, the author designed a specific teaching plan on the speech act of giving advice. Then, the instructional design was conducted out in Class Two. After the class, the author applied classroom observation, self-reflection, interview of the participants and the Discourse Completion Tasks(henceforth DCT) test to evaluate the instructional design The result of DCT test is positive. The mean of participants’ grades in post DCT test is obviously superior to that in pretest, proving the effectiveness of the teaching plan. Then synthesizing various opinions from supervisors, participants and researcher’s classmates, the author modified the instructional design. Afterwards the author reviewed the problems that emerged in the process of designing and put forward some pedagogical implications suggesting teachers to build a corpus of pragmatic knowledge. In the end, a self-criticism is made on the limitations of this paper in the hope of providing insights for the further studies.