Chapter One Introduction

It is assumed in this research that,of various issues existing in current Chinese EFL teaching,a comprehensive construct of pragmatic competence in communicative competence is a matter of very grave concern to the success of English learning and the ultimate attainment of English proficiency.The assumption comes from the fact that although the concept of communicative competence has been introduced into second or foreign language teaching and research serving as guiding constructs for the design of communicative competence as the overall goal of language teaching and assessment（Rose and Kasper,2001:1）over the past 30 years,there are still full of controversies and different interpretations about its componential constituents.Of these various interpretations,there exist inadequate or misleading understandings of communicative competence in the current second or foreign language teaching and research according to Swender ＆ Duncan（1999）,Swaffar,Kramsch,Schulz,et al.（2006）,which greatly impacts the establishment of the instructional objectives and the practical teaching of the target language.The assumption of the research also stems from the difficulty of imparting pragmatic knowledge to the students in EFL context because EFL teaching is largely at a disadvantage in pragmatic acquisition and development as compared to ESL teaching（Hwang,2009:22）.Then,the assumption holds that teaching pragmatic competence not only increases students' target lan guage proficiency,but also relates to the improvement of their cognitive ability and critical thinking as it can be considered a way of promoting students to have a better knowledge of western and Chinese culture,and a way of helping students to cultivate thinking pattern of the target language.With the assumption,we attempt to make an exploration of pragmatic competence based on the recent research achievements of contemporary linguistics and applied linguistics.This research is seeking to adopt a cognitive approach to the construct of pragmatic competence in FL/EFL context in order to provide some implications for the theoretical and practical foundations in Chinese EFL teaching and research.