A Case Study Of Pragmatic Awareness And Pragmatic Teaching Of Senior High School English Teachers

When learning a foreign language,learners are expected to be able to communicate effectively in that language,which implies that there is more than lexicogrammar in language learning.Learners not only need to acquire grammatical knowledge in the target language but also need to learn pragmatic knowledge that is ingrained into the language beyond the word and sentence level.If SL/FL students only pay attention to lexico-grammatical knowledge in target language learning,there is a high chance for miscommunications and misunderstandings when using the target language in authentic contexts,especially with native speakers of the language.In China,ignoring pragmatic acquisition in English instruction is,to some extent,confined to the concept of “dumb English” learning.Therefore,pragmatic teaching has drawn more and more attention to Chinese EFL teaching in recent years.As for senior high school English teaching,the General Senior High School English Curriculum Standards(2017 Edition)have made clear requirements for students’pragmatic knowledge of English learning.However,it has been found in practical teaching,that senior high school English teachers scarcely teach relevant pragmatic knowledge because they still pay more attention to the teaching of grammatical knowledge.Hence,this study put forward the following research questions:(1)what is the current situation of senior high school English teachers’ pragmatic awareness?(2)whether senior high school English teachers carry out pragmatic teaching in class?(3)What does senior high school English classroom teaching look like in terms of pragmatic teaching?To further explore these three research questions,this study adopts a case study method.It takes a high school in Kunming,Yunnan province as the research site,and two English teachers of the high school as the research participants.The current situation of pragmatic teaching of Senior English teachers was investigated through classroom observation and interviews.Based on five months of interviews and classroom observations,this study describes in detail the pragmatic awareness and pragmatic teaching of the two participants.The research findings are as follows:(1)The pragmatic awareness of senior high school English teachers is not strong.Both participants in this research do not receive any systematic pragmatic teaching courses so they do not know how to teach pragmatic knowledge correctly.In their mind,pragmatics is only a vague concept that is irrelevant to English teaching.(2)By observing the practical classroom teaching of senior high school English teachers,this study concluded that senior high school English teachers do not conduct explicit pragmatic teaching from three pragmatic perspectives of context,culture,and politeness.(3)Due to senior high school English teachers’ lack of pragmatic awareness and their implicit pragmatic teaching,there are many pragmatic problems in senior high school English classes.This study mainly listed two kinds of problems of senior high school English classroom teaching through the perspective of teachers’ implicit pragmatic teaching and teachers’ classroom language.