An Investigation Of Middle School English Teachers’ Pragmatic Teaching In Classroom

The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022 Edition)released by the Ministry of Education states that the content of the English curriculum at the compulsory education level consists of elements such as topics,discourse,language knowledge,cultural knowledge,language skills,and learning strategies,among them,pragmatic knowledge is an important part of language knowledge.Learning and mastering certain pragmatic knowledge can help students choose formal or informal,direct or euphemistic,spoken or written forms of language according to the purpose of communication,the degree of formality of the communicative situation,and the identity and role of the participants,so that they can communicate with others appropriately and politely,and improve their ability to use English effectively and flexibly.Meanwhile,previous studies have shown that students’ pragmatic competence does not necessarily improve naturally with the accumulation of language knowledge and language ability but needs to be effectively acquired and improved through explicit or implicit pragmatic teaching.Therefore,it is necessary to conduct pragmatic teaching in the English classroom at the compulsory education level.The current research on pragmatic teaching generally focuses on university and high school levels.There is a lack of systematic analysis of teachers’ teaching strategies in classroom pragmatic teaching,and research on teachers’ pragmatic competence and pragmatic awareness is rare.Thus,researchers don’t have a clear understanding of the current situation of pragmatic teaching in compulsory education.This study investigated junior high school English teachers’ pragmatic competence,pragmatic awareness and their pragmatic teaching strategies in the classroom to understand the current situation of their pragmatic teaching.On the one hand,this study could make up for the lack of existing research;on the other hand,it could enhance more teachers’ pragmatic teaching awareness and better implement the requirements of the new curriculum,so as to improve teaching quality and cultivate students’ development.This study took 30 English teachers from a key junior high school in Jingzhou,Hubei as research subject and adopted classroom observation,assessment and questionnaire as methods.First,junior high school English teachers’ pragmatic competence was investigated from the perspectives of speech act theory,negative pragmatic transfer,politeness principle,adaptation theory and cooperation principle.Then teachers’ pragmatic awareness in teaching was investigated from four aspects: emphasis on pragmatic teaching,understanding of pragmatic knowledge and requirements from the curriculum standards,pragmatic teaching design in the preparation stage and pragmatic teaching in class.Third,four types of junior high school English class(listening,reading,grammar and writing class)were observed and recorded,and teachers’ pragmatic teaching strategies in each type of class were analyzed.Finally,the study provided a comprehensive analysis of the causes of deficiencies in pragmatic teaching in junior high school and made suggestions for improvements from multiple perspectives.The results of the investigation showed that junior high school English teachers lacked theoretical knowledge of pragmatics and had insufficient pragmatic competence and incomplete awareness of pragmatic teaching.Classroom observations revealed some differences and commonalities in the pragmatic teaching strategies adopted by teachers in the four different types of English classes.The common strategies adopted include comparative culture teaching,pragmatic teaching resources selecting and abundant communicative opportunities providing.At the same time,problems such as unclear setting of pragmatic goals,unbalanced input of meta-pragmatic knowledge,lack of real-life contextual input,and neglect of pragmatic feedback are common in pragmatic teaching.At the same time,problems such as unclear setting of pragmatic goals,unbalanced input of meta-pragmatic knowledge,lack of real-life contextual input,and neglect of pragmatic feedback were common in pragmatic teaching.Combining the results of classroom observations,assessment and questionnaire,the factors that contributed to the lack of pragmatic teaching in junior high school English classrooms included limited classroom time,lack of pragmatic knowledge,insufficient pragmatic teaching resources,inconspicuous pragmatic information in textbooks,unreasonable activity settings,low language competence of students and the neglect of pragmatic knowledge in assessments.In response to the different reasons,this study proposed suggestions for improvement such as teacher training,resource supply,teaching design,textbook and test improvement,extra-curricular teaching activities setting and assessment system reform.This study deepened the understanding of the current situation of teaching pragmatics in junior high school English classrooms and provided more data for the subsequent pragmatics teaching and related research.Nevertheless,there were still certain limitations in this study.Firstly,the research sample is limited to one middle school in Jingzhou.Secondly,the study chose several of the most classical pragmatic theory to conduct investigation.Therefore,the observation result had some limitations.Finally,the pragmatic competence assessment in this study could only reflect a brief but not a whole or detailed picture of junior high school English teachers’ pragmatic competence.Future research can expand the selection of samples and put more pragmatic theories and assessment methods into consideration.Besides,scholars should also integrate the requirements of the new curriculum standard on pragmatics into test design,make research on linking junior high school pragmatic teaching with senior high school and pay more attention to practical research on pragmatic teaching.