Construction Of The Assessing System Of Senior High School Students’ Pragmatic Competence In English Writing And The Initial Verification Of Its Applicability

With the deepening of China’s opening to the outside world and the rapid development of the economy,as well as the steady progress of The Belt and Road Initiative,cross-cultural communication activities are increasingly frequent,and talents with higher foreign language skills are warmly welcomed by all sectors of society.As the most common language of communication,English is quite different from Chinese in terms of usage and cultural background,which puts forward higher requirements for English learners who should not only master basic language knowledge,but also have certain pragmatic and communicative abilities to adapt to the development of society.As an important way to measure the development of students’ pragmatic competence,pragmatic competence assessment is also one of the hot topics in the field of pragmatics.However,some deficiencies still exist in present research on pragmatic competence assessment at home and abroad.First of all,the assessment instruments used to test students’ pragmatic competence are inconvenient to use.Secondly,the current assessment of pragmatic competence mainly focuses on oral communicative competence such as speech act,ignoring the pragmatic competence in written language.Based on the above research background,this paper attempts to build a scientific,reasonable,convenient and applicable assessing system that can be used to evaluate senior high school students’ pragmatic competence in English writing quantitatively.This study will focus on the following three issues:(1)What is the current situation of the evaluation of English pragmatic competence in senior high school?(2)What elements should be included in the assessing system of senior high school students’ pragmatic competence in English writing?(3)Is the assessing system applicable for evaluating senior high school students’ pragmatic competence in English writing?To answer the above questions,this study investigates the current situation of the evaluation of English pragmatic competence in senior high school by means of literature analysis and teacher interviews,and finds that it is necessary to build an assessing system suitable for evaluating the pragmatic competence of senior high school students.This study takes senior high school students’ written English pragmatic competence as the research subject,and selects their English writing as the assessment text.In the specific research process,firstly,through literature review and teacher interviews,this paper initially determines the composition framework of senior high school students’ pragmatic competence in English writing.Secondly,through trial test by teachers and expert consultation,the assessment dimensions and scoring criteria of pragmatic competence are revised according to the opinions and suggestions of teachers and experts,and an initial assessing system is formed.Thirdly,210 students are randomly selected from the third grade of the High School Affiliated to Taiyuan Normal University,whose answer sheets of writing in mid-term English test are taken as the assessment text.After the collected data are analyzed,a formal assessing system of senior high school students’ pragmatic competence in English writing is formed.Finally,this study uses the assessing system to test students’ pragmatic competence,and analyzes the correlation between scores of assessing system and college entrance examination to preliminarily verify its applicability.The main conclusions are as follows.(1)There is still a lack of unified standards and quantitative measurement instruments for judging students’ English pragmatic competence and the implementation effect is poor;(2)A more scientific and effective assessing system has been constructed,which is composed of two parts: the Written Pragmatic Competence Evaluation Scale and the Written Pragmatic Competence Scoring Standard;(3)The assessing system has high reliability and validity,and is positively and significantly correlated with college entrance examination,so it is applicable for evaluating senior high school students’ pragmatic competence in English writing.The construction of this assessing system not only enables students to have a clear understanding of their English pragmatic competence level,but also enables teachers to learn about students’ pragmatic competence and its dynamic changes in real time and quickly by analyzing the students’ English writing.It also provides a reference and evaluation instrument for the cultivation of students’ pragmatic competence,which ultimately helps to improve the teaching effect.