An Investigation Of The Relationship Between Pragmatic Competence And Language Learning Strategies Of Chinese College English Learners

Pragmatic competence refers to the ability to use a target language in a tacit andappropriate way, which is an essential component of communicative competence.Research on pragmatic development constitutes one of the concerns of interlanguagepragmatics (IP), a disciplinary branch across pragmatics and second languageacquisition (SLA). Similar to the research tradition of SLA, the influence ofindividual differences (IDs) on pragmatic development has come to attract attentionfrom the researchers in the field of IP.Language learning strategy is one of the important variables of IDs. Therefore,it is of significance to study the role of learning strategy in pragmatic development.Pragmatic study is a cognitive activity as well as a social activity. Thus the cognitiveprocessing theory is usually chosen as a theoretical base in studying pragmaticdevelopment, and learning strategies are also viewed in cognitive theory as complexcognitive skills. Thus, these two variables are related to each other in naturetheoretically.This thesis attempts to investigate Chinese college English learners' pragmaticcompetence, English learning strategies, and the correlation that lies between the twovariables. The subjects include 40 English-major postgraduate students and 91first-year non-English majors from two normal classes. The study chooses He Ziran's(1987) Pragmatic Competence Questionnaire, Oxford's (1990) Strategy Inventory forLanguage Learning(SILL) as instruments to conduct a quantitative research.The result reveals that the pragmatic competence of the subjects is still on a low level. And their pragmalinguistic competence is of a little higher level compared withtheir sociopragmatic competence. There is a significant difference between the twogroup means, which suggests that the postgraduate students with high languageachievement may result in a corresponding advancement of pragmatic competence.Moreover, the strategy use of the undergraduate and postgraduate students issignificantly different.The correlation analysis shows that correlations between all the six types oflearning strategies and pragmatic competence are significant and positive. Among thesix types, compensation strategies get the highest coefficient; affective and socialstrategies are very important factors that influence the pragmatic competence. Acausal model concerning pragmatic competence has been established, showing thatcompensation, affective and social strategies are powerful predictors of pragmaticcompetence.In all, the findings do provide strong evidence that the use of learning strategiesaffect the learner's pragmatic competence. Thus, it is advisable for teachers not onlyto teach students pragmatic knowledge, but also the use of learning strategies toimprove their pragmatic competence from another perspective.