A Study On Grammatical Competence Of Non-English-Major College Students

Along with the development of research in linguistics, the definition ofgrammatical competence has been enriched continuously, among which, the mostrepresentative one is given by Larsen-Freeman. She believes that grammaticalcompetence should not be confined to grammatical knowledge i.e. form and meaningbut includes the use of grammatical knowledge as well. This proposition agrees withthe ultimate aim of cultivating learners with ability of using English accurately,meaningfully and appropriately. Therefore, this study adopts her definition as theframework and composes a test in two dimensions of grammatical knowledge and theuse of it separately to investigate non-English-major college students’ grammaticalcompetence.The test paper consists of four parts, namely grammatical knowledge test,grammatical and pragmatic awareness test, discourse completion test and note-writing.And the subjects are134non-English-major sophomores selected randomly from aprovincial technology college. The test results reveal that: the subjects master alimited type of forms and can not tell the force between different forms, nonetheless,they can not apply the existing knowledge in practice flexibly; their understandingand using of grammatical knowledge are still confined to sentence level without theoverall discourse competence; they are restricted to Chinese thinking habits and lessequipped with cultural, pragmatic and discourse knowledge.It’s well known that many factors affect students’ grammatical competence, butas a teacher the author accumulates five proposals from the point of view of grammarteaching: Focus on the comparison of difference of thinking habits, linguistics andcultures in Chinese and English in order to reduce negative transfer of mother tongue;Use “Focus on Form” syllabus as guide and take form and meaning together with useinto account; Conduct output practice in authentic context to achieve transformationfrom knowledge to ability; Convert from analysis of form and meaning of sentencelevel to that of form and function of discourse level at an advanced grammar teachingstage; Integrate with such pragmatic theories as Cooperation Principle and PolitenessPrinciple etc. in grammar teaching.