Abstract

Pragmatic competence has attracted increasing attention and research in SLA. Most studies, however, are product-oriented rather than input-oriented. A study of the learning targets without the support of findings from the study of the input to the learners would have no sound and reasonable basis. In view of this, we set out to explore the essentials of pragmatic input in structured or unstructured teaching contexts. An experiment was done to show whether pragmatic input to Chinese EFL learners in language teaching and learning is quantitatively and qualitatively sufficient. Findings show that the Chinese EFL learners are in great shortage of pragmatic knowledge and consequently lag behind in the development of pragmatic competence and such shortage is attributable to lack of inadequate pragmatic input. Taking into consideration the results of the present study and those yielded from related research, we propose that the pragmatic input to the learners should be enriched, contextualized and offered explicitly, and the Chinese learners of English are expected to play a more active role in acquiring necessary pragmatic input from all sources in the learning context of modern China.

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