An Interlanguage Pragmatics Investigation Into Chinese College Students' Interlanguage Pragmatic Development

Traditional interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) studies mainly focus on interlanguage (IL) learners'ability (IL pragmatic competence) to understand and perform speech acts in given contexts from a macro and theoretical perspective. With the deepening of researches in this field, studies on how to develop IL learners'IL pragmatic competence have increasingly aroused the attention and the interest of many pragmatists and language educators, for it will not only help to find out effective ways to improve IL learners'IL pragmatic competence, but bring about great effects on cross-cultural communications and college foreign language teaching.Though some sporadic experimental explorations have occurred in recent years, their research subjects are only confined to the IL learners of several western countries, without touching upon those under the eastern cultural background at all (except Japanese IL learners). In China, college students are a core part of English learners. It is, therefore, quite necessary and worthwhile to carry out experimental researches on their IL pragmatic development.This paper selects college students from different grades and majors as the subjects, aiming at seeking effective and efficient approaches to develop their IL pragmatic competence and attempting to gain details about their actual IL pragmatic competence by means of a questionnaire survey. After a statistic data analysis, many valuable findings have been obtained: for example, their average interlanguage pragmatic failure rate is above forty percent; a good control of IL linguistic competence does not guarantee a good level of IL pragmatic competence, and so on.Thus, both tentative implicit and explicit approaches on the IL pragmatic development of college students are accordingly put forward so as to help them improve their IL pragmatic competence. Another key point has also been discussed in the paper, that is, to raise college students'IL pragmatic awareness. Only when their IL pragmatic awareness has been raised can they interact and cooperate with English teachers in rapidly promoting their IL pragmatic development.It is assumed that this paper can be viewed as an empirical attempt and an important supplement to the ILP research field. Further studies on this aspect will be more beneficial to cross-cultural communication and college English language learning and teaching.