Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
Language is the main communication tool of human beings. It is broadly recognised thatthe goal of English teaching is to equip students with communicative competence (WangZhenya, 2005). The world is becoming a “global village”, in which the ability to understandand communicate effectively with people of different cultures takes on extreme urgency (ZhuLisheng, 2004: 14). The education of foreign language must satisfy the modern social needs.With China’s open-up policy to the world and active participation in the international affairs,the foreign language teaching and learning in China has been called for a higher levelperformance. Changes in language education reflects people’s understanding in the kind ofproficiency the language learners need (Richards & Rodgers, 2001: 3). In decade years, theattitude towards English instruction in China has changed dramatically. The emphasis ofEnglish learning shifts from the mastery of grammatical knowledge to communicativecompetence.Communicative competence consists of linguistic competence and pragmaticcompetence (Bachman, 1990). According to Levinson (1983: 24), pragmatics is the study ofthe ability of language users to pair sentences with the context in which they would beappropriate. In order to develop the foreign language learners’ communicative ability, moreflexible teaching techniques are in great demand in improving their pragmatic competence.
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1.2 Purposes of the Study
By exploiting the multiple-choice discourse completion task questions as the pragmaticcompetence testing instrument, this study tries to explore a new pragmatic assessment testsuitable for the requirements of China’s English testing system. One the one hand, we hope tospeculate on the specifications of pragmatic competence in the national matriculation Englishtest by analyzing the multiple-choice discourse completion task questions. Hughes (2000: 45)states that if the specifications of test make clear just what test-takers have to be able to do,and with what degree of success, they will in their mind be free of confusion of what theyshould accomplish. Then it will be easy for them to succeed on the test. One the other hand,by examining the pragmatic competence testing results, the author is attempting to discoverthe main causes of pragmatic failure which the senior high school students produce.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Introduction to Relevant Terms
In chapter two, some definitions of relevant terms are introduced in the former part:communicative competence, pragmatic competence, and pragmatic failure. The introductionto these definitions concerning this study is very necessary to well understand the wholestudy . The term “Communicative Competence” was coined by Dell Hymes in 1966. Hymes(1972) later defined communicative competence not only as an inherent grammaticalcompetence but also as the ability to use grammatical competence. Wiemann and Backlund(1980) noted that communicative competence is the ability of an interactant to choose amongavailable communicative behaviors. When someone successfully achieves his owninterpersonal goals during an encounter, he at the same time maintains the face of his fellowinteractants. These statements show that the person with strong communicative competencecan fulfill his interpersonal goals by making a thoughtful consideration to others incommunication.Bachman (1990) proposed a framework of communicative language ability (CLA),which includes three components: language competence, strategic competence, andpsychophysiological mechanisms. He further illustrated that the language competenceconsists of two parts, i.e. organizational competence and pragmatic competence. As one of theessential parts of communicative competence, pragmatic competence is dispensable becauselinguistic knowledge and basic language skill training are far more than enough in foreignlanguage acquisition.
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2.2 The Studies on Pragmatic Competence
Since the notion of "pragmatic competence" was suggested, the study on pragmaticcompetence has been exploited by numerous researchers. The findings show that the nativespeakers tend to be tolerant with the non-native speakers' phonological, syntactic and lexicalerrors, which are considered as incomplete acquisition of the the foreign language. In contrast,the non-native speakers who lack pragmatic competence are negatively judged."Can pragmatic competence be taught?" It has become one of the controversial questionsin foreign language acquisition. Some studies aim to answer the questions of whetherpragmatic knowledge can be taught explicitly in the foreign or second-language classroom,and at what level pragmatic proficiency can be expected to be attained. Kasper (1997)extensively discussed the general questions of whether pragmatics can be taught. Byexperimental research, he concluded that pragmatics can indeed be taught. House (1996)explored whether explicit instruction on pragmatics in foreign language acquisition had moreeffect on learners' pragmatic ability than a instruction carried out with less pragmaticinstruction. Data were collected in classes, and students were measured through role-playsbefore, during and after instruction. The result of the study showed that the “explicit” groupbenefited more from the pragmatic instruction.
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Chapter Three Research Design........ 16
3.1 Study Questions..... 16
3.2 Subjects ..... 16
3.3 Instrument........ 17
3.4 Procedure of the Study ...... 19
Chapter Four Results and Discussion...... 21
4.1 The Characteristics of the MDCT Questions in NMET.... 21
4.2 Statistic Analysis of the Testing Results ......... 22
4.3 The Analysis of Pragmatic Failure...... 23
4.3.1 Analysis of Pragma-linguistic Failure......... 24
4.3.2 Analysis of Socio-pragmatic Failure..... 27
Chapter Five Conclusion....... 30
5.1 Major Findings ...... 30
5.2 Implications..... 31
5.2.1 Implication for English Teachers .... 31
5.2.2 Implication for Students ...... 33
5.3 Limitations ...... 34
5.4 Suggestions...... 35
Chapter Four Results and Discussion
4.1 The Characteristics of the MDCT Questions in NMET
In the present educational situation, the national matriculation English test undertakesdouble tasks: selecting talents and assessing the students’ comprehensive abilities. Not onlythe pragmatic competency is one important aspect that NMET tends to assess, but theevaluation of the students’ logical reasoning ability is highlighted as well. For the purpose ofassessing the test-taker’s communicative ability, the multiple-choice discourse completiontask is designed to create an authentic situational and communicational context. Here is atypical MDCT question with a situational description: In order to evaluate their comprehensive abilities, there is not a single specific situationaldescription given to the test-takers in the multiple-choice discourse completion tasks. In orderto choose the tentative appropriate answer for each question, the students have to figure outthe most possible situation in which the conversation takes place, and the relationshipbetween the two interlocutors.
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Conclusion
The previous chapter has witnessed some important data and evidences of the presentsituation of pragmatic problems in senior high schools. And pragmatic competence andpragmatic failure of senior high school students are discussed within the given categories.This study revealed that the pragmatic knowledge of senior high school students is inadequatein some aspects.Chapter five provides the summary of these findings, and explore some feasible ways topragmatic competence development in English teaching and learning. The limitations of thisstudy will be presented, and suggestions for further studies will be given in the final part. In this study, the senior high school students are measured by a pragmatic competencetesting paper compiled from questions in NMET. The analyses in the previous chapter revealssome pragmatic problems of the students.In accordance with the testing scope of pragmatic competence in the NMET testingpapers, the number of testing questions of pragma-linguistic competence is more than that ofsocio-pragmatic competence questions. From the analyses of MDCT questions, we finds thatthe questions are well corresponding to the part of “Everyday Expressions” in NewCurriculum Standards for Senior High English(2003). And the appropriate use of phaticexpressions is the focus of the assessment on socio-pragmatic competence.
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