Pragmalinguistic Awareness And Pragmalinguistic Competence: A Survey Of EFL Learners' Request Speech Acts

This study examined Chinese college students'pragmalinguistic competence, and explored the relation between subjects'awareness of pragmalinguistic forms and their pragmalinguistic competence. Different from previous comparative studies concerning pragmatic competence, the current study planned to take acquisitional orientation.The experiment employed three measures: awareness retrospection questionnaire (ARQ), discourse completion test (DCT) and multiple-choice Test (MCT). In the session for attentional allocation, the participants were instructed to mark their awareness degree of the target forms in a 6-point scale immediately after form-search treatment. Two weeks later, they were instructed to finish both DCT and MCT, each consisted of six scenarios of different sociopragmatic factor combinations.The results are shown as follows. Initially, EFL learners detected the difference between NSs and NNSs in expressions concerning making request. But they did not show significant attention to them, with a mean attention degree of 3.5. Secondly, ability strategy like"Can (Could you) you…"and willingness strategy"Would you please…?"were predominantly preferred in EFL'S request head act production, which was also characterized by simple structure and few use of lexical modifiers. In contrast, NSs showed their favor on possibility strategy, like"Would it be possible…'. NS's rating showed that generally the EFL learners can make request without problem (Mean = 3.4), though not nativelike yet. Thirdly, great difference appeared between NSs and NNSs in request form choices under scenarios, with a mean approximation degree of 2.5. Fourth, the data suggests that no significant correlation between EFL learners'awareness degree of pragmalinguistic features and their productive and perceptive performance, though some clues can be founding the corpus.The present study compensates for few studies on the relation between EFL learners'awareness of pragmalinguistic features and their pragmalinguistic competence. The results and discussion could provide some implication on future studies of pragmatic interlanguage and pragmatic teaching.