Correlation Between Pragmatic Competence And Linguistic Competence

The correlation between pragmatic competence and linguistic competence is a controversial issue in the field of interlanguage pragmatics(ILP) and has drawn great academic attention in foreign countries,whereas in China,only a small number of scholars have made investigations into their relationship.Moreover,most of them have concentrated on learners' perception ability of some routine expressions rather than the production of a specific speech act.This thesis aims at exploring how Chinese English learners' linguistic competence correlates with the development of their pragmatic knowledge,taking their performance of the speech act of refusal as an instance.47 second-year students from a senior high school in Hubei Province and 60 sophomores majoring in English from Southwest University participated in the study.The data for this study was elicited through two questionnaires, one discourse completion test(DCT) consisting 12 refusal items,and the other questionnaire requiring students to circle the sources of pragmatic knowledge.The participants' pragmatic competence of the speech act of refusal was compared from two perspectives,namely,pragmalinguistic competence and sociopragmatic competence. Meanwhile,the sources about the pragmatic knowledge of refusal and the role of classroom instruction were also investigated.The results suggest that sophomores have a higher level of pragmalinguistic competence in the speech act of refusal than the high school students.However,the two groups of participants still have some difficulty in reaching the sociopragmatic competence of natives though sophomores make a little bigger progress.The data also reveals that Chinese English learners usually acquire the pragmatic knowledge from the textbook,English class,English teacher,TV,movie,reading outside classroom,their own experience,intemet,broadcast,newspaper or foreign friends.Classroom instruction plays a very important role in learning the knowledge.Finally,a model for teaching pragmatic competence in the classroom is presented.