An Empirical Study On Pragmatic Awareness Of Non-English Major Graduates

Successful language learners always have awareness to use appropriate strategies to communicate.They can not only notice certain contextual factors such as social power and social distance etc., but also can consciously predict the possible damage of inappropriateness, what is called pragmatic awareness.Aiming at the degree of non-English major graduates’ pragmatic awareness, this study selected 89non-English major graduates(We use learners in the following chapters) at the North University of China.The specific data collection involves the following steps:(1) The questionnaire containing ten scenarios that cover speech acts of “request” “refusal” “suggestion” and “apology” is chosen from Bardovi- Harlig& Dornyei(1998).(2) The ten scenarios are made into ten videos.(3) Learners are required to finish corresponding questionnaire tasks after watching corresponding videos. After completing the 10 questionnaire tasks, the learners are expected to choose two tasks with pragmatic infelicities and repair them in role-plays a week later. And the role-plays are recorded.(4) All the recordings are transcribed.The research questions are listed as follows:(1) Which speech act(refusal, request, suggestion and apology) can be obviously noticed by non-English major graduates?(2) Do non-English major graduates repair pragmatic infelicities appropriately? If not, why not?(3) In terms of pragmatic awareness, is there any significant difference among learners of different language proficiencies?After data analysis by means of Excel and SPSS, the study concludes that:(1) Learners’ pragmatic awareness of request(M = 8.10) is the highest among acts of refusal(M = 5.61), suggestion(M = 3.67) and apology(M = 3.38);(2) Learners perform differently in repairing pragmatic infelicities according to different speech acts. Specifically, learners of repairing request perform appropriately(100%), because all of them notice what to repair and how to repair the italicized sentences with appropriate strategies according to corresponding social power and social distance. Learners of repairing refusal(5.56%) and learners of repairing suggestion(18.18%) perform inappropriately, because they are unaware to adopt indirect strategies to implement the two acts when facing hierarchical system(P+, D+), although they know what to repair. In terms of apology, although learners(95%) know to express “sorry” and give explanations when facing deference system(P-, D-), no one group is aware to take responsibilities, which lead to their performance inappropriately. Throughout the whole performance of role-plays, it proves that all learners fail to adopt unconventionally indirect strategies in request and suggestion.(3) There is no significantdifference of pragmatic awareness among learners of different language proficiencies. This is partly due to that College English Tests(both CET-4 and CET-6) don’t involve in pragmatic competence as contents of their tests. Thus their English proficiencies cannot affect their pragmatic awareness.According to the analysis above, we conclude that most non-English major graduates can notice what to repair about pragmatic infelicities, but fail to notice how to repair them appropriately, which seems to indicate what learners may benefit from instruction.