An Empirical Study Of The Relationship Between English Pragmatic Competence And English Proficiency Of The Grade-one Students In A Higher Vocational College

The main purpose of foreign language teaching is to cultivate language learners’ communicative ability which includes pragmatic competence as an indispensable component. However, foreign language teaching in China used to overemphasize language forms and language structures while overlooking the cultivation of students’ pragmatic ability. Recently, Chinese language researchers and English instructors have realized this problem and shifted their focus to the situation and the development of Chinese EFL learners’pragmatic competence. Some cross-sectional studies show that students’pragmatic competence does not develop with the improvement of their linguistic proficiency.Most cross-sectional studies have focused on the pragmatic competence of English or non-English majors at universities and colleges while little attention has been paid to the situation of the pragmatic competence of higher vocational college students. Another problem is that many of these studies assess students’linguistic proficiency by their educational levels rather than by a unified proficiency test.Considering the importance of pragmatic competence and the limitations of previous studies, the present research investigated the pragmatic competence of the students from four classes (two parallel classes and two intact classes) at Zhejiang Tourism College by a Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Test, and measured their linguistic proficiency by their scores in College English Test Band 3, aiming at describing the current situation of higher vocational students’pragmatic competence and analyzing the relationship between their pragmatic ability and their linguistic proficiency.As the research results revealed, the overall situation of the informants’pragmatic competence was far from satisfactory and their pragmatic levels appeared to be heterogeneous. As for the two parallel classes at the same proficiency level, the pragmatic level of these two classes was about the same as well; both of the two intact classes were at a higher proficiency level, compared with the two parallel classes, but the students in intact class 1 did not perform significantly better than their counterparts in parallel class 1 in the pragmatic competence test. The Pearson correlation analysis further proved that the informants’pragmatic competence and their linguistic proficiency were significantly correlated, though the correlation coefficient was at a very low level. Through interviews with twenty-four students and five teachers, the present study also explored the major causes for the informants’ pragmatic failures exposed in the pragmatic test and the possible factors influencing the development of their pragmatic ability, which can serve as an evidence of improving EFL teaching in higher vocational colleges.