A Study Of English Majors’ Pragmatic Competence Under The Compensation Hypothesis

Nowadays, with the increase of cross-cultural communication, requirement for successful communication is becoming more and more strict. Realistically speaking, good command of English especially high skill and competence in using it has become the basic condition in the job market. While at present lots of English majors cannot use appropriate English to communicate with foreigners and commit a lot of pragmatic failures. The paper aims to elaborate on the current situation among the English majors, in the hope of shedding some light on importance of context and context-learning by students themselves.The study makes a review of related theories both in China and abroad, including four theories:Compensation Hypothesis, Context, Pragmatic Competence and Pragmatic Failure. It also explores students’sense of context and their pragmatic competence, based on the "Compensation Hypothesis" established by Professor Chuming Wang.A questionnaire and a discourse completion task were used to do the survey in the present study. They aim to explore the following questions:①Do the students have the sense of context when they learn English?②Is the pragmatic failure of the students caused by the mismatch of context?③What is the relationship between the pragmatic competence of the students and their English proficiency level?In this study, sixty sophomore English majors in Qingdao University of Science and Technology participated as subjects. The results of the qualitative analysis reveal:①Most participants have little sense of context when they use English in real life. This is why they always make some pragmatic failures.②Many pragmatic failures in their speech are caused by the mismatch of context which is also the direct result of having less sense of context.③Their pragmatic competence does not have some fixed relationship with their English achievementFinally, the author presents some pedagogical implications. It is suggested that the teaching of context and target-culture should be emphasized in the teaching activities and teachers should search effective methods which can promote students’self-learning. At the same time students should take charge of their own study instead of being passive receivers and try to get access to as many sources of target culture as possible to increase their stock of contextual knowledge.