A Survey On The Pragmatic Competence Development Of Chinese English Learners And Implications For Pragmatic English Teaching

In this global village of modern society, cross-cultural communication permeates people's everyday life. English, as an international language frequently used, has gained much more attention than ever before. However, communication breakdown frequently occurs between people from different cultures due to various reasons.Cross-cultural communicative competence by Widdowson (1989) includes two aspects: linguistic competence and pragmatic competence. Linguistic competence is made up of three components—phonology, lexicon, and grammar, and pragmatic competence, the other important component of communicative competence, is the ability to select a linguistic form that is appropriate for a specific situation, or to use the language appropriately in specific social interactions.Researches reveal that the pragmatic competence of the Chinese English learners is much poorer than their linguistic competence. Pragmatic competence has been almost neglected in the traditional language teaching. As a result, though English learners have memorized a lot of new words, mastered the grammatical knowledge, and even got high scores in various tests, they frequently failed to use the English language appropriately or to interpret it in an acceptable way and they found themselves quite at a loss when interacting with native speakers in real life. Hence pragmatic failure in communication. But the teachers often attributed pragmatic failures to insufficient knowledge of the English language.This research attempts to investigate into the problem of how well Chinese students have developed their pragmatic competence after linguistic pragmatics entered China 20 years ago, reflected in the ability to realize such daily interactive acts as greeting, addressing, compliment, refusal, apologizing, appreciation and so on. For this purpose, the author has collected data using a questionnaire of 50 questions on twelve natural classes of English majors and non-English majors from Taiyuan University of Technology. The answers collected are then processed by SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Science) Version 12.0 for Windows. Consequently, the author finds that the students' pragmatic competence is not adequately developed and their pragmatic competence, either the English majors or the non-English majors, is relatively at a low level, because of the frequent appearance of pragmatic failures in their answer to the questions.Pragmatic failure is noticeable since it tends to cause misunderstanding or even hatred between native speakers and Chinese English learners. Successful communication is undermined and harmonious interpersonal relationship hindered. In this thesis, the potential sources of pragmatic failure are discussed along lines of pragmatic differences, pragmatic transfer, and improper input, which will definitely make us more aware of the importance and the urgency for pragmatic competence development.As a result, the author proposes preliminary suggestions and practicable remedies for pragmatic competence development, such as explicit teaching of pragmatic principles, making use of pragmatic transfer and adding authentic teaching materials etc, aimed at providing useful guidance for English teachers and directing their attention from simple language teaching to effective communication teaching in the foreign language environment.In order to help students communicate successfully in the cross-cultural context, it is significant to identify and reduce students' pragmatic failures and to develop their pragmatic competence effectively. The objective of language learning should be to achieve the ability to communicate with native speakers in real situations, not only to know about the language.