An Investigation Of The Relationship Between Pragmatic Competence And Motivation For Non-English Majors

Language is used for communication. Pragmatic competence, which is essential in English teaching, is an important component of communicative competence. It refers to the ability to use a target language in a tacit and appropriate way. The development of pragmatic competence will enhance that of foreign language learners'communicative competence.Study on pragmatic development is one of the major concerns of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP). Scholars at home and abroad have made plenty of studies on the description of pragmatic competence and the relations between pragmatic competence and language grammar. At present researches on the development of pragmatic competence and on the factors which influence the sound development of pragmatic competence are still at its early stage. Thus the influence of individual differences on pragmatic development becomes a hot issue in the field of ILP. Study on the role of language learning motivation, an important individual difference variable, has naturally become one of the main research topics.Both Gardner's socio-educational model and Dorneyei's 3-level motivation theory point out that motivation has an undoubtedly evident effect on foreign language learning. It is generally considered as one of the main determinants of foreign language learning achievement. It plays a unique and significant role in learning a foreign language.This study discusses the relation between pragmatic competence and language learning motivation. In detail, it is designed to investigate the general level of students'pragmatic competence and the subjects'main pragmatic failure, the main dominant types of motivation the subjects'possess, and the correlation between the subjects'motivation and pragmatic competence.The subjects are 111 non-English majors. A pragmatic questionnaire is used to gather data about the subjects'general level of pragmatic competence; a motivation questionnaire is used to get information about the subjects'dominant types of motivation. SPSS is used to analyze the correlation between the subjects'motivation and pragmatic competence.Results show that students'general pragmatic competence is at a low level. Their sociopragmatic competence is better than pragmalinguistc competence. Most of the subjects hold instrumental motivation as their dominant motivation. Significant correlation has been found between pragmatic competence and language learning motivation (r=.582; p=.000). According to the survey results, the author provides several suggestions on cultivating and maintaining learners'motivation in their pragmatic learning.