This paper aims at investigating effective classroom-based instructive methods that facilitate the development of pragmatic competence of the intermediate-level adult English learners in China,who have gained relatively high grammatical competence but low pragmatic competence.The paper starts with the importance and components of pragmatic competence.It then examines what should be taught to help develop learners' pragmatic competence.The paper focuses on some explicit instructive methods adopted by the author in her conversational English class that may raise learners' awareness of pragmatic knowledge and enhance learners' practice of pragmatic abilities:1) Encouragement of learners' observation of pragmatic phenomena by English speakers from authentic audio-visual materials;2) Discussion of linguistic variations for each speech act and strategies of carrying out certain speech acts according to contextual cues; 3)Role-play tasks engaging students in different speech events and communicative actions.The effectiveness of these methods is shown by test results after at the end of the course.