A Comparative Study On The Pragmatic Competence Of The Non-English Major Undergraduates And Postgraduates

One of the most important thing for learning a foreign language is to cultivate the learners' communicative competence. However, whether a learner's communicative competence is good or not depends not only on his/her linguistic competence, but also on the ability to use the language appropriately, in other words, pragmatic competence. Pragmatic competence is the ability to understand and perform illocutionary acts correctly in communication, and is a part of communication competence. Professor He Ziran points out that pragmatic competence can be summarized as two aspects—the comprehension and the production of language. In order to speak appropriately, the speaker should consider the social and cultural factors in certain context; in order to understand the utterances, the receptor of the utterances should know the communicative principles and multiple levels of utterances meaning.Based on Thomas and Leech's study, this thesis studies pragmatic competence in terms of pragmalinguistic competence and sociopragmatic competence. Firstly, this study makes a comparison on the correlations of learning motivation, learning strategies and pragmalinguistic competence between postgraduates and undergraduates; and then it compares the correlations of postgraduates' and undergraduates' learning motivation, learning strategies and sociopragmatic competence. This thesis trys to answer the following questions: (1) What are the undergraduates and postgraduates' current level of pragmatic competence respectively? (2) In what way, does learning motivation have some influences on undergraduates and postgraduates' pragmalinguistic competence and sociopragmatic competence? (3) In what way, does learning strategy have somen influences on undergraduates and postgraduates' pragmalinguistic competence and sociopragmatic competence?Based on the detailed analysis of the data, this study gets such findings as follows: (1) There is significant difference in pragmalinguistic competence between undergraduates and postgraduates. However, there is no significant difference in sociopragmatic competence between undergraduates and postgraduates. (2) For total samples, the pragmalinguistic competence has significant correlations with learning motivation and learning strategies. However, the sociopragmatic competence does not have significant correlations with learning motivation, and with learning strategies it does. (3) There are significant correlations between pragmalinguistic competence and integrative motivation for both undergraduates and postgraduates, but for the latter the correlations are higher than those for the former. The correlations between postgraduates' instrumental motivation, their attitude towards learning English and their pragmalinguistic competence are higher than those for undergraduates. On the whole, the postgraduates'pragmalinguistic competence has more significant correlations with learning motivation. (4) All the correlations between pragmalinguistic competence and three factors of learning strategies for postgraduates are significant rather than undergraduates'. (5) Both groups of students' sociopragmatic competence have negative correlations with instrumental motivation, but the correlations for the undergraduates are higher than those for postgraduates. However, all the other two factors of learning motivation for postgraduates have more correlations with sociopragmatic competence than those for undergraduates. On the whole, the correlations between learning motivation and sociopragmatic competence for postgraduates are stronger than those for undergraduates, and only the correlation between learners'attitude towards learning English and sociopragmatic competence for postgraduates arrives at a significant level. (6) All the correlations of postgraduates' sociopragmatic competence and three factors of learning strategies are higher than those of undergraduates. The correlations of postgraduates'sociopragmatic competence and social/affective strategies are significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). On the whole, the postgraduates'learning strategies have significant correlations with sociopragmatic competence rather than the undergraduates'.