Improving Chinese Senior High School Students’ English Pragmatic Competence

General Senior High School English Curriculum Standards(2020)emphasizes the importance of developing students’ English pragmatic competence.Based on the Noticing Hypothesis,this study adopted a quasi-experimental study of pretest-posttest to study the effect of the III approach upon developing the pragmatic competence of Chinese senior high school students,in using the English past tenses.92 students from 2 natural classes in Senior High Grade 1 in a Middle School in Sichuan participated in the experiment.Among them,60 students(33 girls and 27 boys)were selected and randomly assigned as subjects into the experimental group and the control group.The 2 groups had the same starting level of pragmatic competence based on a pre-test in the form of ODCT(Listening and Oral Discourse Completion),and the same teaching materials,teacher,and class hours,etc.The III approach was applied to the teaching in the EG,while the method used in the CG was the generally practiced teaching method that generalized from an interview on 10 in-service teachers.After the experiment,a post-test similar to the pre-test was given to the same subjects.SPSS16.0 was used to analyze the data.The results show that there was no significant difference between EG and CG in the pragmatic competence of using the past tenses,including the attitudinal past and the hypothetical past,before the experiment.However,after the experiment,it was found that the scores of EG were significantly higher than those of the CG in terms of total scores,the attitudinal past,and the hypothetical past.In addition,the progress of the EG from pre-test to post-test was also extremely significantly greater than that of the CG in the 2 pragmatic aspects examined.Therefore,the III teaching approach applied in the experimental class is effective in enhancing senior high school students’ pragmatic competence with regard to the use of English past tenses.Especially,asking students to pay attention to the linguistic features,such as the speaker’ identity,social status,and speakers’ intentions in learning pragmatics enables them to use the English past tenses better and more appropriately.The results hold some implications for the teaching of and research into English pragmatic teaching and research in Chinese senior high school,in the background of General Senior High School English Curriculum Standards(2020).For the development of students’ English pragmatic competence,pragmatic teaching should be included in class and real contexts should be provided to help students notice the language features.