An Investigation Of Influence Of Motivation On Interlanguage Pragmatic Competence

Pragmatic competence can be explained as the ability to use a target language tactfully and appropriately, which is an essential component of communicative competence. It goes without saying that the development of pragmatic competence plays an important role in English teaching since grammatically correct English sentences do not stand for appropriate English. More and more teachers realize that the development of pragmatic competence is of great significance in EFL teaching. The mastery of correct forms of language does not guarantee appropriate use of the language and the lack of pragmatic competence may result in pragmatic failures. So the investigation of Chinese college students' pragmatic competence is quite necessary.As a new interdisciplinary branch of study, interlanguage pragmatics is a main part of second language acquisition. It describes not only the pragmatic characteristics of non-native speakers' language, but also the development of pragmatic competence. Up to now, many researchers have discussed the questions about learners' target language in pragmatic comprehension and their pragmatic production. Besides, lots of studies have been conducted on pragmatic failures and transfers. However, only a few studies have been done on the development of pragmatic competence. In recent years, with the extensive studies on individual differences, interlanguage pragmatics has paid more attention to the influence of individual differences on the development of pragmatic competence. Language learning motivation is one important individual difference variable. The study on the role of motivation in pragmatic development should become one of the main research topics.Motivation is one of the main variables that govern foreign language learners' achievement. Its importance in language learning cannot be neglected. It has received longterm extensive attention from some researchers. Gardner et al put forward socioeducational model on the basis of social psychology. Deci and Ryan divide motivation into intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation from cognitive psychology. Learner autonomy in learning process is stressed in this model. Dornyei's three-level categorization emphasizes the combination of language learning motivation and teaching situation.Although pragmatic development has become one research topic for interlanguage pragmatics and scholars have done much research on the role of motivation, there exist few studies about its impact on pragmatic development. The present author conducted a correlation research with the help of questionnaires, attempting to answer this question.The thesis is mainly divided into seven parts. The first part is the introduction. The background of the study and purpose of the thesis are introduced. The second part intends to make a historical review of motivation and interlanguage pragmatic competence. The third part devotes to the theoretical study of the motivation and pragmatic competence. The fourth part is the research design of methodology investigation. The fifth part is the discussion of the case study. The sixth part, based on the pedagogic implication, puts forward some tentative methods of stimulating and maintaining students' intrinsic motivation of developing interlanguage pragmatic competence and gives some feasible suggestions on the current college English teaching. The seventh part is the conclusion.The thesis aims at finding out the students' positive type of motivation through the investigation of correlation between motivation and interlanguage pragmatic competence and discusses how to encourage and maintain students' motivation that could help the development of students' interlanguage pragmatic competence in English classes.