A Comparative Study Of Pragmatic Errors In English Writing Between Students Of Chinese And Science From Independent Colleges

English plays an important role in international communication as a lingua franca.In order to achieve specific communicative purpose,the interlocutors have to adopt necessary communicative strategies which are based on pragmatic competence.So the level of pragmatic competence is related to the quality of conversations.The pragmatic error is a kind of phenomenon that the speaker fails to use the target language efficiently under a certain context and this type of error not only exists in the process of oral communication,but also appears in writing.Jenny Thomas is the first scholar who conducted the research about it.In her article,Thomas referred it to the pragmatic error and classified into the pragmalinguistic error and the sociopragmatic error.The former refers to the differences and misunderstanding between two languages,while the latter is about the different social coverage that hinders the linguistic usage.Besides,the researches of S.P.Corder and Carl James also have great influences.Writing is one of the most crucial aspects about the cultivation of linguistic output among the teaching of English because the linguistic competence of students has to be tested and improved through the process of linguistic output.However,the pragmatic competence of most non-English major students in their writing is not perfect enough,which leads to the lost of points.Under this circumstance,it?s of great significance to conduct a research about the pragmatic errors in writing so as to provide useful suggestion for English teaching.This thesis selected two different groups of sophomores which consist of 164 students from the Departments of Chinese and Science in Lijiang College of Guangxi Normal University as research subjects and their writing papers from the final examination of second semester are chosen as research materials.The comparative study of the pragmatic errors among the writing is the main issue of this thesis and the taxonomy of Carl James is adopted for detailed classifications for the contrast of different types of pragmatic errors.The analyses of the error causes are conducted under the methods of interview and classroom observation.It can be found from the research that the error on substance level showed little differences while the errors about verb,noun and some other subcategories illustrated more differences.On the level of discourse,the students from Chinese group had more errors on cohesion while Science major students made more errors on coherence.In accordance with the results gathered from data analysis,the author analyzed the causes of these pragmatic errors and provided some suggestions on the levels of substance,text and discourse for the improvement of English teaching for the future research.