A Study On The Pragmatic Competence Of Chinese College Students

With the development of globalization, communication with foreign countries becomes more and more frequent. In such an environment, it grows more and more important to cultivate English learners’ cross-cultural communicative competence. The primary objective of English teaching is to cultivate students’communicative competence, a vital part of which is pragmatic competence. This objective has been included in College English Curriculum Requirements for decades. However, Chinese English teaching has been centered on linguistic forms, such as vocabulary, structure and grammatical rules, ignoring cultivation of students’pragmatic competence. This situation has drawn attention of many scholars and teachers in recent years and started to do related researches on pragmatic competence from different aspects. Some of them have been studying the current situation of English learners’pragmatic competence. Some have been interested in the relationship between linguistic competence and pragmatic competence. And some others have been studying approaches to improve English learners’ pragmatic competence.This thesis uses questionnaire test and retrospective interview to study the current situation of college students’ pragmatic competence from the three components of pragmatic competence:speech act competence, speech appropriateness and cross-cultural background knowledge. The subjects are forty junior students from English Department and forty-four freshmen from Chinese Language and Culture. All of them are from Suzhou College. The study uses SPSS to analyze data and adopts quantitative and qualitative analysis as research method. Specifically speaking, this study is intended to answer the following questions:1) What is the general situation of pragmatic competence of the subjects and their detailed performance in the three components of pragmatic competence? 2) What is the relationship between the subjects’pragmatic competence and linguistic proficiency? And what is the relationship between the subjects’ linguistic competence and the three aspects of speech act competence, speech appropriateness and cross-cultural background knowledge? 3) What are the causes of the subjects’ pragmatic failures?The results of this study are as follows:1) The overall pragmatic competence of the subjects is relatively weak; the subjects performed worst in speech act competence and best in cross-cultural background knowledge; the subjects’performance in speech act competence is significantly different from their performance in speech appropriateness and cross-cultural background knowledge; however, there is no significant difference between their performance in speech appropriateness and cross-cultural background knowledge.2) The English majors’pragmatic competence is higher than the non-English majors, which manifests that pragmatic competence has a positive relationship with linguistic proficiency. However, English majors’ performance is significantly different from that of non-English majors only in the aspect of speech act competence, not in the aspects of speech appropriateness and cross-cultural background knowledge. This shows that linguistic proficiency is positive to speech act competence, but not positive to speech appropriateness and cross-cultural background knowledge.3) The thesis finds that there are many reasons for pragmatic failures, such as negative cultural transfer, ignorance of pragmatic theories, different value orientations and so on.It is hoped that this study may provide some scientific and detailed basis for the improvement of English teaching in college and university.