Foreign Chinese Language Learners’ Language Proficiency And Inter-language Pragmatic Competence

This thesis aims to probe into the relations between language learners’interlanguage pragmatic competence and their language proficiency in a foreignChinese language learners setting. The objective of this paper is to reveal the patternof relations between foreign Chinese language learners’ Chinese language proficiencyand pragmatic competence with regard to speech acts, routines, and implicature and toinvestigate the reasons behind it.90foreign Chinese language learners with threedifferent levels of Chinese language proficiency took part in a pragmatic test withthree sections: speech acts, routines, and conversational implicature. Significantdifferences were found among the three groups in the speech acts and conversationalimplicature section but not in the routines subtest. The advanced group got the highestmean score in all the three sections. While in the routines section, significantdifferences were only found between the elementary group and the advanced group.The result implies that different components of foreign Chinese learners’interlanguage pragmatic competence do not develop parallel. Proficiency can affectlearners’ pragmatic competence but does not play a dominant role. The developmentof pragmatic competence is a complicated process affected by many other factors.A questionnaire was designed to explore other factors in the learners’ Englishlearning process that can affect their development of pragmatic competence. Theintermediate group was found to enjoy the most advantageous instructions. Aninformal interview with the students of the three groups suggested that the content andmethod of teachers’ instructions on pragmatic knowledge had essential influence onthe development of foreign Chinese language learners’ ILP competence.