Vocabulary Acquisition With Pragmatic Awareness

Vocabulary acquisition has always been the focus of foreign language learners because vocabulary ability partly determines learners' communicative competence and the size of vocabulary is one of evaluating indicators of learner's language proficiency. Researches of L2 vocabulary acquisition abroad and at home are mostly related to the historical origin of vocabulary acquisition, methods of vocabulary teaching, and theoretical patterns of vocabulary learning procedure and so on. But there are some insufficiencies in such researches, especially lacking systematical study on the factors which will affect the pragmatic competence in the process of vocabulary acquisition.Vocabulary acquisition can't be simply regarded as the acquisition of linguistic knowledge. However, more attention should be paid to the cultivation of pragmatic consciousness in the process of vocabulary acquisition. So studies should emphasize on the following factors influencing pragmatic competence: vocabulary misuse caused by pragmatic failures and misunderstandings of word meaning, and contextual and cultural backgrounds that affect the mastery of word meaning. By means of a questionnaire and a vocabulary test paper, the author of this thesis conducted a survey among 106 second-year non-English majors from the Chengdu University of Information Technology (CUIT), which involved the vocabulary (pragmatic) learning strategies, pragmatic competence in the process of vocabulary acquisition, and the mastery of word meaning.After analyzing the data with the statistical analysis software SPSS, the following conclusions are drawn: 1) although the participants have a general tendency to employ various vocabulary (pragmatic) learning strategies, the frequency is not high. Dictionary strategies rank the first and memory strategies rank the last among the four categories of strategies; 2) the overall situation of...