Relationship Between Pragmatic Ability And Grammatical Ability--An Empirical Study On Gift Offering And Accepting

This study aims to sort out the relationship between pragmatic ability and grammatical ability, with a particular focus on the speech act set of Gift Offering and Accepting (G.O.A.). G.O A. in this study is set to be the situation of a student offering gifts to his foreign tutor to show gratitude and respect instead of bribery.The subjects of the study were 30 second-year English majors and 24 first-year chemistry students at Shanghai Teachers' University. After a pioneering proficiency test for the 54 subjects, the two groups were rearranged according to their scores achieved to be: 24 subjects in the higher proficiency sample and 30 in the lower proficiency sample. Then the two newly-set groups were required to write a letter, first in Chinese, and the second, in English, telling his friend what to say to achieve the G.O.A. communication goal in China and in UK in the form of dialogue. The writing was followed by a questionnaire, asking the subjects about the main sources (5 options are given) of the knowledge about G.O.A.The analysis of the two writing tasks consisted of two stages, i.e., the identification of G.O.A. schema in both English and Chinese, and the identification of pragmatic transfer. Based on the two identifications, the results show that Chinese learners' development of pragmatic knowledge is not concurrent with that of their grammatical knowledge; the deviation of the learners' schema of G.O.A. in western culture occurs only partially at the Gift Offering Stage; classroom instruction plays little role in the learners' development of pragmatic knowledge of G.O.A. in English, while TV and out-of-class reading are the two main sources. As for pedagogical implication, grammatically right utterances might be improper pragmatically, so systematic pragmatic knowledgeteaching should be put more emphasis on in class..