Enhancing Chinese Senior High School Students’ Competence Of English Pragmatic Mitigation:A Salience-focused Teaching Experiment

As an important part of pragmatic competence,the competence of pragmatic mitigation is an indispensable skill for language learners in the process of language learning.However,the currently inadequate attention to students’ pragmatic competence in English teaching in China has resulted in low pragmatic competence and frequent pragmatic mitigation failure in English speaking.Besides,there has been relatively little research on the competence of pragmatic mitigation of senior high school students in China.Especially,little empirical research has explored whether the salience-focused teaching of pragmatic mitigation strategies can improve students’ competence of pragmatic mitigation.Therefore,the general research question of this study was whether the teaching method employed in the experimental class more effective than the generally practiced method in enhancing Chinese senior high school students’ use of English pragmatic mitigation strategies? The thesis used an experiment to investigate the possibility of improving Chinese senior high school students’ competence of English pragmatic mitigation,using a salience-focused method to teaching pragmatic mitigation strategies.The participants of the experiment were 92 students from 2 classes of Grade 2 in a senior high school in Chongqing.The 2 classes were randomly treated as a control class and an experimental class,with 45 and 47 students respectively.Based on the pre-test score,30 students from each of the 2 classes were selected as subjects for the control group and the experimental group.The 2 groups had no significant difference in the competence of pragmatic mitigation.The speaking teaching method currently used by most teachers was generalized from an interview on 10 in-service English teachers and used in the control class.The experimental class added salience-focused teaching of pragmatic mitigation strategies to the teaching method of the control class.During the experiment,the teaching materials,length of teaching time,teacher,and after-class assignments were the same for both classes.A pre-test and a post-test were used to collect data about the subjects’ competence in pragmatic mitigation in general and in 6 specific strategies.The results of the experiment show that there was no significant difference between the experimental group and the control group in their competence in pragmatic mitigation before the teaching experiment.Both the experimental group and the control group improved after the teaching experiment.However,on the one hand,the experimental group very significantly outperformed the control group in the post-test,in general competence of pragmatic mitigation,and in the 6 strategies as well.On the other hand,the progress of the experimental group was also extremely significantly greater than that of the control group,in general competence.Therefore,the conclusion is that the salience-focused teaching of pragmatic mitigation strategies is effective in improving Chinese senior high school students’ competence of pragmatic mitigation.The study holds important implications for teachers to improve Chinese senior high school students’ English pragmatic competence.