A Study On The Correlations Of High School Students' Pragmatic Awareness,Pragmatic Competence And Grammatical Competence

The New English Curriculum Standard(2011)points out: the overall goal of English curriculum at the basic education stage is to develop students' comprehensive language skills.As is known to all,the newly revised curriculum makes it the ultimate objective for students to conduct communications while learning a foreign language,and in the meanwhile,both pragmatic competence and grammatical competence are the indispensable components of communicative competence.In recent years,for one thing,there has been a sharp rise in the number of researches done on the relationship between pragmatic competence and grammatical competence by scholars at home and abroad.For another,some studies have been conducted on the influence of the degree of the awareness on the development of its respective competence,such as the influence of pragmatic awareness on the enhancement of pragmatic competence.In spite of this,studies on whether there are significant correlations between pragmatic awareness,pragmatic competence and grammatical competence are nowhere near enough.In addition,throughout the previous studies,most of them have been done among those high proficient learners,like English majors.As a result,there have been rare studies that are involved with the current situation of high school students' pragmatic awareness,pragmatic competence and grammatical competence.Against this background,this study has adopted two types of research instruments,test and questionnaire survey to research on students from two classes of a senior high school in Nanchong.This study is conducted with the aim of answering the following three research questions: 1)Is there a significant correlation between pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence? 2)Is there a significant correlation between pragmatic competence and grammatical competence? 3)Are there any significant differences in pragmatic awareness,pragmatic competence and grammatical competence of students with different English proficiency? Through data analysis,this study has achieved the following results: 1)Pragmatic awareness is significantly correlated with pragmatic competence.The development of pragmatic awareness has a decisive effect on the development of pragmatic competence.To put it in another way,pragmatic awareness is directly proportional to pragmatic competence.The higher awareness students have,the better pragmatic competence they will gain.2)Pragmatic competence and grammatical competence are not significantly correlated with each other.The development of either pragmatic competence or grammatical competence is decided by its respective awareness.Learners who have a better pragmatic competence do not necessarily have a better grammatical competence.In the meantime,learners who have a lower grammatical competence do not necessarily gain a lower pragmatic competence.3)On the part of respondents with different English proficiency,differences in their pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence are not significant.Despite the fact that the pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence of learners with higher English proficiency are slightly higher than those of lower proficiency,the differences are not significant.However,difference in their grammatical competence is much too significant.Learners with higher English proficiency have better grammatical competence than those with lower English proficiency.This study is mainly divided into five parts.The first part is introduction,which mainly illustrates the background,significance and the organization of this study;the second part includes the definitions of pragmatic awareness,pragmatic competence and grammatical competence,and the related theories and researches at home and abroad are also covered in this part;the third part is research design,which mainly covers research purpose,research questions,research subject,research instruments and so on.The fifth part is the conclusion of this study,which simply summarizes the research results and provides some pedagogical implications and points out some limitations of the study.