Chinese EFL Learners' Pragmatic Awareness And Competence Versus Grammatical Awareness And Competence

The rapid development of economy and technology has brought us into an age of globalization in which we are increasingly in contact with people from other cultures. English teachers and students are more aware of the importance of communicative competence of the foreign language learners. Foreign language learners'pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence are indispensable parts of their communicative competence. There has been more and more attention on how to enhance the pragmatic awareness of English learners and facilitate the English language learners'interlanguage pragmatic competence.Researchers at home and abroad have done a lot of studies on developing 1earners'pragmatic competence, but the researches on the pragmatic awareness are relatively limited. Bardovi-Harlig & D?rnyei (1998) investigated the participants'pragmatic awareness and grammatical awareness and found EFL learners had a lower degree of pragmatic awareness than grammatical awareness. Li Min & Chen Xinren(2007) replicated Bardovi-Harlig& D?rnyei's study to investigated Chinese English majors'grammatical and pragmatic awareness as well as grammatical and pragmatic competence. Their findings are contrary to that of Bardovi-Harlig and D?rnyei, they found that Chinese English majors'degree of pragmatic awareness was significantly higher than that of grammatical awareness and their pragmatic competence was much better than their grammatical competence. Li Min & Chen Xinren only studied the English major students and their participants are limited to forty-nine students only. Hence a study among non-English major students and more participants is worth conducting. This thesis explores not only the English major students, but also the non-English majors. The author adopts Bardovi-Harlig and D?rnyei's research questionnaire in a written form to investigate135 second-year non-English major students and 46 English major students from Xihua Universtiy.The empirical investigation conducted in this research find that the Chinese English learners have higher degree of pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence than grammatical awareness and grammatical competence. But neither their pragmatic competence nor their grammatical competence is satisfactory. The students'pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence are significantly correlated, so are their grammatical awareness and grammatical competence. But pragmatic awareness and grammatical awareness are largely independent and the same is true of their pragmatic competence and grammatical competence. The students may have higher pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence, but their pragmatic competence in real communication is rather limited as shown by their explanation or correction of these infelicities or errors. As to the influence of language proficiency, this thesis has some new findings. For the non-English major students their language proficiency has obvious influence on their pragmatic awareness, pragmatic competence, grammatical awareness and grammatical competence. The higher language proficiency group has higher pragmatic awareness and competence, grammatical awareness and competence than the lower language proficiency group. But this result can not be applied to the different language proficiency groups between English major students and non-English major students. The English major students perform a better job at pragmatic infelicity recognition but rate the infelicities as less serious than the higher proficiency non-English majors. And both their grammatical error recognition and severity rating are lower than that of the higher language proficiency non-English major group.The results can be a proof of the transition from grammar-translation method to the communicative approach in recent years. The widely adopted communicative approach has its merits as shown by the Chinese English learners'higher pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence, but on the other hand there is a lack of adequate attention to the fostering of grammatical competence. So the author suggests that due attention should be paid to grammar while cultivating the students pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence. And as the students'pragmatic competence is higher but not satisfactory, the author offers some tentative suggestions on the education system as well as English teaching concerning how to improve the students'pragmatic competence.