An Investigation Of High School Students' English Pragmatic Competence

The ultimate goal of foreign language teaching is that students can use the language to communicate;that is,to cultivate students' communicative competence.Pragmatic competence,as an important part of communicative competence,has attracted more and more attention.Pragmatic competence refers to the ability to use language for appropriate communication,which includes language expression and language understanding.Undoubtedly,the lack of pragmatic competence will cause pragmatic failure,which may affect communication.At present,although there are more and more researches on pragmatic competence,the majority of them mainly focus on undergraduates and researches on high school students are relatively less.Thus,the research subjects in this study are high school students,aiming to investigate the current situation of their pragmatic competence.In this research,English pragmatic test was adopted to investigate the general state of high school students' English pragmatic competence and the main kinds of their pragmatic failure.This thesis also aims to analyze whether there is a correlation between pragmatic competence and English achievement.In addition,interview was also employed to explore students' attitudes towards pragmatic competence and the underlying causes of their pragmatic failure.The subjects are 259 high school students from Grade One in Tianjin 25 th Middle School,and 12 of them took part in the interview.The main findings of the research are as follows:(1)The general state of high school students' pragmatic competence is at a low level,which is unsatisfying.(2)High school students have both pragmalinguistic failures and sociopragmatic failures,and they have more pragmalinguistic failures.(3)There is no positive correlation between high school students' pragmatic competence and English achievement.That is to say,students who perform well in English examination do not certainly have a good development of pragmatic competence,and vice versa.The main reasons for the low level of high school students' pragmatic competence are as follows:(1)The lack of pragmatic awareness(2)The lack of understanding of cultural differences between China and the West(3)Negative transfer of mother tongue and decontextualized language teaching.As for the low level of high school students' pragmatic competence,some suggestions are provided to develop their pragmatic competence.Firstly,it is conducive to arousing teachers' and students' pragmatic awareness.Secondly,various teaching resources and devices can be made full use of to conduct cultural instruction such as setting up courses to compare Chinese and Western culture,holding relevant lectures on a regular basis,watching English movies,or reading English literature.Thirdly,English teaching should be contextualized.It is expected that the above suggestions can be helpful to cultivate high school students' pragmatic competence.