A Study On The Correlation Between English Majors’ Grammatical Competence And Pragmatic Competence

As an important part of English comprehensive language proficiency,the relationship between students’ grammatical competence and pragmatic competence has been studied for a long time in academic community.Scholars have done a lot of researches,and the results are different.In China,the research on the relationship between the two is studied relatively late,and main research objects are middle school students.Other studies focused on college students,most of them are non-English majors,and relatively few researches on English majors.Therefore,English Majors(mainly about freshman,sophomore and junior)are selected as the research objects to explore the relationship between their grammatical competence and pragmatic competence in this study.The questionnaire survey are mainly adopted to test 206 English Majors’ grammatical competence and pragmatic competence of a university in Yan’an City,Shaanxi Province.It is mainly asked to answer the following two questions:1.What is the current situation of English Majors’ grammatical and pragmatic competence?2.What is the main correlation between English Majors’ grammatical competence and pragmatic competence?The results are as follows:(1)The grammatical competence of the College English majors investigated is generally at a low level(failing to the pass level),and the three dimensions of grammatical competence are not satisfactory.The application of grammar in practice is still the biggest problem for students of all grades.(2)On the whole,the pragmatic competence of English majors is at a low level(close to the passing level),and the two dimensions of pragmatic competence are unbalanced.In contrast,the dimension of pragmalinguistic competence is better than that of socio-pragmatic competence.(3)There is a significant correlation between the sentence monitoring skills and the sentence manipulating skills,between the sentence production skills and the sentence monitoring skills,between the sentence manipulating skills and sentence production skills in the grammatical competence of English majors.The sentence manipulating skills in English grammatical competence is significantly correlated to the pragmatic competence.There is a significant correlation between pragmalinguistic competence and the socio-pragmatic competence in pragmatic competence.However,students’ grammatical competence was not statistically correlated with pragmatic competence.Through the above research results,the following implications are dressed.(1)The three grammatical dimensions involved in this paper are different aspects of the same system,so they should be taught as a whole and inseparable.Because of the three dimensions have different levels of difficulty,it is necessary for teachers to make reasonable allocation of time and make specific arrangements according to the actual situation of students,and the teaching of the three dimensions of grammatical competence should be emphasized.(2)Pragmatic competence is acquired,not learned.Therefore,there is no need to teach too much pragmatic knowledge in foreign language teaching.As long as learners’ linguistic proficiency reaches a certain level,pragmatic competence will be naturally developed.First of all,let students understand the differences between Chinese and English and the pragmatic differences brought about by them.In the process of teaching,the English teachers should teach relevant pragmatic knowledge in detail,providing a variety of grammar and functions of a certain pragmatic feature in different contexts.In daily teaching,teachers,to the greatest extent,should provide pragmatic knowledge training in specific situations to effectively transform students’ understanding ability into productive ability.(2)Because of the influence of native language pragmatic competence,when foreign language learners acquire a new language,it is easy for them to transplant their native language pragmatic competence to the foreign language,resulting in transfer.Therefore,the sentences of social norms should be output and pragmatically appropriated in foreign language teaching,and the grammatical correctness of the discourse should be focused as well in the process of language teaching.This study invested the correlation between grammatical competence and pragmatic competence of College English majors,it is hoped that providing supplement and reference for the research in this field in theory,and provide reference and suggestions for the teaching of grammar and pragmatics in College English Teaching in practice,so as to promote the development of comprehensive language proficiency of English majors.