Pragmatic Competence In Gratitude Expressions Within The Scope Of Interlanguage Pragmatics

Interlanguage pragmatics is an interdisciplinary subject between pragmatics and second language acquisition. As an indispensable part of interlanguage pragmatics, pragmatic competence has attracted a lot of interests. The realization of pragmatic competence is presented by language learners’ speech acts. At present, great achievements have been made in the area of pragmatic competence, from the perspective of various speech act, namely, apology, request etc. But there are a few researches conducted from gratitude expressions.This study examines the speech act of expressing gratitude adopted by Chinese university students as foreign language learners(EFL). The participants of this study are 55 freshmen from a university of northern region. The written discourse completion test(WDCT) and multiple-choice completion test(MDCT) are employed as research instruments. Both WDCT and MDCT are designed to find out among all the participants. This study aims at answering the following three research questions:1. Is there correlation between Chinese university students’ languageproficiency and their competence in gratitude expressions?2. What are the features of the Chinese university students’ gratitudeexpressions?3. What is the difference between Chinese university students’ pragmaticcompetence and pragmatic awareness?Based on the data analysis, the following findings can be concluded:(1) There is no significant correlation between pragmatic competence and language proficiency in higher proficiency group, while there is correlation between pragmatic competence and language proficiency in lower proficiency group.(2) No significant difference is found in the percentage of acceptability of gratitude expressions used by two groups; and strategies used by participants vary in accordance with social factors presented in different situations.(3) There is no significant difference in pragmatic awareness for two groups; and the pragmatic awareness demonstrated by the two groups is much stronger than their pragmatic performance.