Pragmatic Comprehension Of Chinese EFL Learners At Different English Language Proficiency Levels

The dozens of studies on L2 learners'pragmatic competence carried out over the past 30 years have mostly focused on learners'pragmatic production, especially the realization of speech acts. As one aspect of pragmatic competence, pragmatic comprehension has not received much attention. Even though there are a few studies on learners' pragmatic comprehension, they have mainly applied reading materials as an instrument. The present research used authentic context-rich listening prompts to measure Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic comprehension. It intended to investigate whether second language proficiency affects pragmatic comprehension. The participants included 60 college students of English at 2 proficiency levels:30 CET4 non-English major learners and 30 TEM8 learners. They completed a listening comprehension test focusing on linguistic and pragmatic comprehension. The pragmatic comprehension included speech acts and conversational implicatures subsections. The follow-up interviews were conducted to explore the two groups of learners'characteristics in processing pragmatic meanings.The result showed that higher level learners significantly outperformed lower learners in the whole listening test, the linguistic comprehension, pragmatic comprehension, and the subsections of speech acts and conversational implicatures. There were developmental differences among these two groups of learners. Learners' verbal reports revealed that both groups used some contextual cues, such as paralinguistic cues, background knowledge and personal experience to comprehend pragmatic meaning. Compared with lower learners, higher level learners employed more strategies to derive inferences and demonstrated explicit knowledge of pragmalinguistic cues in pragmatic comprehension. This study offers some theoretical and pedagogical implications. Theoretically speaking, it sheds some lights on the relationship between linguistic competence and pragmatic competence from the perspective of pragmatic comprehension. They are positively correlated in the present investigation. Pedagogically speaking, the research points out the importance of explicit instructions of pragmatic knowledge in the English language classroom. In the instructions, teachers should first teach conventional indirect speech acts and implicatures, and then teach non-conventional speech acts and implicatures. In the pragmatic instructions, teachers need to analyze both linguistic and contextual features of an utterance. A follow-up discussion can be devoted to the reason why the speakers use an indirect utterance to convey implied meaning, for the purpose of deepening learners'pragmatic knowledge.