Strategies Employed In Improving Non-English Majors' Pragmatic Competence

With the development of society, the communication among different countries and nationalities with different cultural backgrounds is increasing. In order to achieve the purpose of smooth communication, foreign language learners must possess adequate pragmatic knowledge and good pragmatic competence as well as their linguistic competence. Then the learners can express their own thoughts appropriately according to the specific context, truly understand others' conversational implicature and effectively avoid pragmatic failures. Learners and teachers, however, always pay less attention to pragmatic competence. They usually stress the training and cultivation of linguistic competence. That leads to an imbalance between pragmatic competence and linguistic competence. Learners grasp a great deal of vocabulary and grammatical regulations but cannot smoothly communicate with others in the target language.This study is based on the theories of pragmatics, and 105 non-English majors are designated as its subjects. It mainly expounds the relationship between pragmatic competence and linguistic competence: how the learners develop their pragmatic competence in the process of language learning and how the teachers cultivate learners' pragmatic competence in the process of teaching. The research questions consist of:1. How is pragmatic competence relevant to linguistic competence in non-English majors?2. What are the factors that influence the formation of pragmatic competence in non-English majors?3. What are the strategies that can improve pragmatic competence in non-English majors?The study is divided into two parts: one is a questionnaire and the other consists of an interview and diaries. The questionnaire is selectively taken from He Zi-ran's " A Survey of Pragmatics" and Zhang Xiao-mei's " College English Teaching and theCultivation of Pragmatic Competence". From the results of the questionnaire, 15 students are selected to attend an interview and also required to keep study diaries. With the help of the interview and diaries, the author analyzes the factors that influence the formation of pragmatic competence and the strategies that can improve pragmatic competence.In conclusion the author proves that pragmatic competence cannot proportionally develop as linguistic competence improves. There are several factors that influence the formation of pragmatic competence, and it is feasible to improve and cultivate learners' pragmatic competence by using various learning and teaching strategies.