A Study Of The Relationship Between EFL Learners' Learning Strategies And Their Pragmatic Competence/Awareness

The ultimate goal of learning a foreign language is to communicate in that language. Pragmatic competence, which is an essential component of communicative competence, refers to an ability to use a target language in a tactful and appropriate way. The level of pragmatic awareness is to some extent the determiner of the development of pragmatic competence.Research on pragmatic development is one of the major concerns of interlanguage pragmatics. Despite the fact that plenty of studies have been made on the description of pragmatic competence and the relations between pragmatic competence and grammatical competence, studies on the factors that influence the sound development of pragmatic competence and pragmatic awareness are still at a premature stage.The present study is an attempt to probe into the correlation between English majors' learning strategies and pragmatic competence/awareness in Chinese EFL context. The purpose is to gain a better understanding of pragmatic development and offer implications on raising their pragmatic awareness thus improving pragmatic competence. To be specific, it is designed to investigate the general state of students'pragmatic competence/awareness and their use of learning strategies, the relation between the subjects'pragmatic competence/awareness and learning strategies has also been examined. A total of 180 first-grade English majors at a university in Southwest China took part in this study. The participants completed the two sets of self-reported questionnaires, including Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) (Oxford,1990) and a revised version of Bardovi-Harlig & Dornyei's (1998) contextualized pragmatic judgment task. The collected data were computed and analyzed via descriptive statistics, t-test, one-way ANOVA, Pearson product-moment correlation and so on. The findings of the studies are generalized as follows:(1) the general learning strategy use of the subjects is rated as medium. The study shows that their pragmatic competence is comparatively high; (2) statistically significant differences are found between male and female students in the use of memory, cognitive, and affective strategy categories and pragmatic awareness. Male students get more scores in the three strategy categories and total score of learning strategies than female students and female students are more pragmatic conscious than their counterparts; (3) the correlation between pragmatic competence and pragmatic awareness is significantly positive, a significant negative correlation has been found between pragmatic awareness and overall learning strategies, and also between pragmatic competence and learning strategies; (4) stepwise regression analysis reveals that both pragmatic competence and social strategies are strong predicators of pragmatic awareness; (5) having conducted path analysis of the factors influencing learners pragmatic awareness, we find that both pragmatic competence and learning strategies can considerably predict pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence may be a mediator..In the light of the above findings, this thesis also examines the implications for pragmatic learning and teaching and cultivating pragmatic awareness. Suggestions of future research in China's EFL context are also provided.