Pragmatic Competence through Language Teaching

This paper discusses three questions: what is pragmatic competence, the teachability of pragmatic competence and how pragmatic competence can be acquired through language teaching. Pragmatic competence is a kind of comprehensive ability, including pragmalinguistic competence, sociopragmatic competence, pragmacognitive competence and discoursal competence. It is studied that pragmatic competence is not likely innate but acquired. Pragmatic knowledge can be acquired, and is only one part of pragmatic competence. When we teach pragmatic knowledge in classroom, several aspects of training pragmatic competence should be focused on, such as language functions and context, the relevance of pragmatic inferences, pragmatic awareness, pragmatic markers and pragmatic tolerance and the like.