A Study On The Development Of Interlanguage Pragmatic Competence Through Pragmatic Strategies

This paper consists of a longitudinal study and a cross-sectional one, aiming to study the development of interlanguage pragmatic competence through the pragmatic strategies under a native speaker-conducted environment. As a combination of qualitative and quantitative researches, this paper adopts various research instruments and selects samples for each step with great caution.This paper starts with a pre-interview with two foreign teachers who are both English native speaker and in charge of different courses for the two sample classes. The teachers are asked to give PC evaluation twice, one at the beginning of the first semester and the other the end of the second semester. The evaluation result shows that, for native speakers, those students did achieve some development during the past one year despite of the different development degree. With the help of evaluation and teachers' recommendation, two groups of students are selected with higher degree of representativeness for further study. Group A (n=12) and Group B (n=12). Group A did much better than group B with significant difference in the PC development. A possible explanation lies in the employment of different PS. It is also found that the development of PS, as an indicator of PC development does not go in line with the development of PC. The interview with students shows that personality does have an effect on the PS although the effect is not so vital. Those students who are willing to learn from classmates or foreign teacher can develop a lot in the PS employment.After that, the two selected groups are observed for the employment of PS when they enter into Grade two, the time PS employment is relatively fixed. Observation finds that there is great difference in the employment of PS among students. The difference goes in line with the rate of PC development. Students in Group A behave actively while students in Group B passively. The differences are observed in such aspects as the vocabulary strategies, the speech act strategies, the non-verbal strategies, the thinking strategies and the behavioral strategies. These PSs fall into two different categories: Active PSs and Passive ones in a new taxonomy. A questionnaire derived from the taxonomy is then designed to collect concrete data, which will be analyzed through t-test or some other statistic methods.