A Correlational Study Of Linguistic Competence And Pragmatic Competence Of Chinese Senior High School Students

It’s widely acknowledged that the ultimate goal of English learning is to be able to communicate with natives fluently and smoothly, however, during the process of language learning, we cannot be oblivious to the importance of pragmatic competence. In China, English teaching always put great weight on language forms and structures, neglecting the cultivation of learners’pragmatic competence. Recent years, Chinese scholars began to realize the problem and focus their attention on the Chinese English learners’development of pragmatic competence.The correlation between pragmatic competence and linguistic competence is always a disputable issue in the field of interlanguage pragmatics and has attracted great attention in foreign academia, in contrast, in China there are only a relatively limited number of scholars who conducted studies to investigate the relationship and it is still an under-researched area. Further more, most of the studies on pragmatic competence have examined adult learners of higher proficiency level. The need to include young intermediate level learners has therefore been advocated.Given the important role that pragmatic competence plays in language learning and the limitations of previous researches, the objective of the present study is to explore how Chinese senior high school students’linguistic competence correlates with their pragmatic competence. Parenthetically, the relationship between pragmalinguistic competence and linguistic competence as well as the relationship between sociopragmatic competence and linguistic competence have also been discussed. Besides, this thesis also attempts to find what kind of pragmatic failures that students committed in the test and potential causes for these pragmatic failures. In total, there are 122 third-grade students in the Senior High School attached to Northeast Normal University participated in the study. While 69 informants came from the top class and 53 informants were from the regular class. The author adopted a questionnaire of pragmatic competence and the English mid-term examination paper to measure the informants’ pragmatic competence and linguistic competence respectively. Moreover, the software SPSS 17.0 has been applied to analyze the relationships.The results indicate that the overall situation of the participants’pragmatic competence is not optimistic and there exists a positive correlation between linguistic competence and pragmatic competence, however, the rather low value of correlation coefficient suggests that the promotion of students’ pragmatic competence does not necessarily hinge on the improvement of their linguistic competence. The Pearson correlation analysis also illustrated the pragmalinguistic competence of the students is positively correlated with their linguistic competence, though the correlation level is rather low, which indicates that the development of the informants’ pragmalinguistic competence can benefit from but cannot depend on the promotion of learners’ linguistic competence. As for the relationship between sociopragmatic competence and linguistic competence, the Pearson correlation analysis suggests that there is no correlation between the two factors, which means that the growth of informants’ sociopragmatic competence was not in pace with the improvement of linguistic competence. Moreover, through analyzing the pragmatic failures committed by the students in the test of pragmatic competence, the author also attempted to dig out the potential causes for the pragmatic failures and made efforts to find the countermeasures which can be helpful in promoting learners’ pragmatic competence.