Classroom Research On Interlanguage Pragmatics

English learners in China, for various reasons, hardly have the chance of acquiring the English language in the authentic English environment. As a result, their attention and energy are directed solely to the few textbooks available. The emphasis on the teaching of linguistic knowledge is partially responsible for the students' vocabulary and grammar-oriented ways of study, which gives students a false impression—Language learning is the process of accumulating vocabulary and grammar rules both in the classroom and outside the classroom. The students have to toil along, trying desperately to memorize a large glossary and a thick grammar book. However the most serious of all, though they have memorized a lot of new words, have mastered the grammatical knowledge, and may be good at scoring high tests, all of this cannot show that they have mastered the practical skills of the English language. They often find themselves quite at a loss as what to say when they meet with native speakers in real life and some problems arise once they communicate with others in English, such as the incorrect use of words (because they try to find the Chinese equivalent for each English word and sentence and they take it for granted that all synonymous words are fully similar in meaning and hence can be used interchangeably), or the inappropriate use of language (e.g. misuse of the form of address, etc).However, pragmatics tells us learning a language is more than acquiring knowledge, which is not the final aim. Language knowledge cannot be acquired only from the book, we have to learn to use language appropriately in socio-cultural contexts. A reasonable, feasible way of acquiring a language is to learn to use, to form the ability to apply the rules of grammar appropriately in the correct situation . The objective of language learning is the ability to communicate with speakers of the target language in real situations, not only to know it Moreover, nowadays more andmore companies are employing staff according to their practical abilities, not just theirdiploma or certificates, which should arouse our attention.Acquiring a language is the process to develop pragmatic competence, i.e., thecommunicative competence to use language appropriately. It involves the ability to produce and understand language that is appropriate to specific social situations and conforms to the politeness conventions of those situations, so the language learners must master the speech act conventions, norms of stylistic appropriateness and the uses of language to establish and maintain social relations.In order to help students use the target language appropriately, I think it is very necessary to find out the differences between native speakers and non-native speakers when they produce and comprehend certain speech acts ,which will be very helpful to teach students to improve their pragmatic competence.In my thesis a survey was conducted with 100 students as my survey subjects to analyze students' pragmatic competence and compare the non-native speakers with the native speakers on three speech acts' expression and comprehension.The thesis is composed of three chapters.Chapter one introduces the definition of interlanguage pragmatics, the necessity to improve pragmatic competence, the theoretical foundation and some other researches related to it, and at the same time points out the major differences between my research and the previous researches.Chapter two elaborates on the methodology involved in my research, complete with the objective, research questions, subjects, instruments employed and data collection. And also in this chapter the data is analyzed, which makes the results more convincing.Chapter three answers the research questions put forward in chapter two, analyzes the possible factors resulting in the differences, and brings forward thefeasible ways to solve the problem, which can be used for reference in the teaching.