Gap Between Chinese EFL Learners' Declarative Pragmatic Knowledge And Procedural Pragmatic Knowledge: Is It Related To Linguistic Proficiency?

The present study sets out to investigate the development of Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic competence in the foreign language classroom setting within the theoretical framework (Faerch & Kasper, 1984) in which a distinction is made between declarative pragmatic knowledge and procedural pragmatic knowledge.Differing from the previous studies on interlanguage pragmatic development, the present study focused on the development of the two types of pragmatic knowledge and their separate relationship with learners' linguistic proficiency. In addition, more than one data elicitation technique was used so that the data collected would provide a more comprehensive picture of pragmatic competence.Altogether 58 English majors participated in the study. They were divided into two groups (i.e., intermediate and advanced) according to their performance on a standardized proficiency test. The 4 instruments employed were: English WDCT, MCQ, Chinese WDCT, and a questionnaire on pragmatic learning conditions. The first two instruments aimed to test respectively the participants' procedural knowledge and declarative knowledge of request making in English. The third instrument attempted to test the participants' knowledge about request making in Chinese, and the questionnaire asked the participants questions about acquisition of English pragmatic knowledge in the Chinese classroom setting.The analysis of the collected data reveals that with advancement in proficiency, (a) the gap between declarative pragmatic knowledge and procedural pragmatic knowledge remains despite the improvement in linguistic proficiency, although there is a slight improvement in advanced participants' awareness of pragmalinguistic functions of some request forms; (b) the declarative pragmatic knowledge is generally fragmented and unsystematic, as shown by the frequent occurrence of pragmatic failure when judging the appropriateness of request forms; (c) the gap between the two types of pragmatic knowledge does not narrow with the advancement in linguistic proficiency.The above results are discussed in the light of the participants' performance on the Chinese WDCT and their responses to the questionnaire on acquisition of English pragmatic knowledge in the Chinese classroom setting. Finally it is concluded that the distinction between declarative and procedural pragmatic knowledge is not only valid theoretically, it has also been empirically proved.