A Study On Correlation Between Senior High School Students' English Grammatical Competence And Pragmatic Competence

According to new English Curriculum Standard,grammatical competence and pragmatic competence are both important components of comprehensive English competence.However,under the influence of exam-oriented education,today's senior high school English teaching attaches more importance to grammatical competence than pragmatic competence.Besides,although these two competences and their correlation have been studied by many experts and scholars for long,no final conclusion on their correlation has been reached so far.What's more,due to a late start of the study in this field in China,not so many research achievements have been made,and they usually take college students as research subjects.Therefore,based on new English Curriculum Standard,this study attempts to take senior high school students as subjects to explore the correlation between English grammatical competence and pragmatic competence.By adopting a survey method,this study carries out grammatical competence tests,pragmatic competence tests and a questionnaire survey among 110 students from a senior high school in Fuzhou.This study attempts to answer three research questions as follows:1.What level are senior high school students' grammatical competence and pragmatic competence at?2.Is there any difference between grammatical competence of high-level students and that of low-level students?What about pragmatic competence?3.Is senior high school students' grammatical competence related to their pragmatic competence?The data collected are processed and analyzed by Excel 2003 and SPSS 13.0.The findings of this study are as follows:1.Senior high school students'grammatical competence and pragmatic competence are both at low levels.2.Compared with low-level students,high-level students'grammatical competence is obviously better while their pragmatic competence is just slightly better.3.There is a weak positive correlation between senior high school students'grammatical competence and pragmatic competence.This study explores the correlation between grammatical competence and pragmatic competence,in the hope of enriching the study in this field theoretically,and practically,giving some useful references and suggestions to senior high school English teaching to promote the full development of senior high school students'English comprehensive competence.