An Empirical Research On Cultivating Junior School Students’ English Pragmatic Competence From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

According to the junior high school English Curriculum Standard(2011),pragmatic competence becomes a key priority in junior high school.Pragmatic competence,as a basic element of communicative competence,refers to the ability to use appropriate languages in a certain situation.However,teachers pay more attention to linguistic knowledge rather than communicative ability,which has lead to pragmatic failures in their communication.Students lose their interest gradually.Therefore,it is imperative to enhance students’ English pragmatic competence.Adaptation Theory(Verschueren,1999)interprets the language using from the integration of cognition,social and cultural functions,which provides a new angle on linguistic phenomenon.This research focuses on exploring whether English teaching method based on the Adaptation Theory has a positive impact on junior high school students’ pragmatic competence.This paper aims to answer the following two questions: 1.What are the changes of students’ interest during the experiment? 2.Will new teaching method based on Adaptation Theory be effective to improve students’ English pragmatic competence?Two classes of Dalian NO.77 Middle School are chosen as the subjects.Class One is the Experimental Group(shortened as EG)and Class Two is the Control Group(shortened as CG).New teaching method based on Adaptation Theory will be used in the EG,and the traditional English teaching will be used in the CG.Moreover,before and after conducting the experiment,the two classes will be tested and the software SPSS 19.0 will be employed to analyze the data.The result shows that the significant difference in pragmatic competence noted in the experiment group,but no obvious difference occurs in the control group.A conclusion can be drawn that this teaching method based on Adaptation Theory has a definite advantage in comparison with traditional teaching methods.However,due to the lack of teaching experience and research ability,this research still has limitations.In future,more experience accumulation and reflection on language teaching should be conducted.