An Empirical Study Of EFL Learners’ Pragmatic Competence Of Routines

Pragmatic competence of routines,as one of pragmalinguistic categories and interlanguage pragmatic competence,mainly includes recognition competence and expression competence.Recently,there is an increasing interest in researching pragmatic competence of routines due to the fact that it is a point of penetration to English pragmatic competence.However,there seems to have been less empirical studies conducted to research this issue related to pragmatic area particularly in China while the western countries mainly got many valuable achievements in the SLA field.This thesis is intended to carry out an empirical research to test 227 EFL learners’ pragmatic competence of routines through combining qualitative and quantitative methodologies and based on the theories of pragmatics and SLA.It also hopes to be able to provide a new perspective to Chinese future research of this issue in the field of pragmatics.This paper mainly studies the researching questions as follows:(1)What is the current situation of EFL learners’ pragmatic competence of routines?(2)What is the correlation between English proficiency and recognition competence,expression competence and pragmatic competence of routines?(3)What is the correlation between gender difference and recognition competence,expression competence and pragmatic competence of routines?(4)What is the correlation between interruption of English learning time and recognition competence,expression competence and pragmatic competence of routines?The results obtained are that:(1)a.overall pragmatic competence of routines of all the subjects seem to be in a relatively low level,among which sophomore students get highest marks and senior students get the lowest;b.there exists a statistical significance between recognition competence and expression competence;c.there is also asignificant difference in the competence between competence of initiating and responding utterances;(2)there is an obvious correlation between English proficiency and recognition competence of routines but expression competence and overall pragmatic competence of routines;(3)there is no significant correlation between gender difference and recognition competence of routines but expression competence and overall pragmatic competence of routines;(4)there is a statistical correlation between interruption of English learning time and expression competence and overall pragmatic competence of routines.The findings of this research own great value to English learning and teaching and have led to the conclusion that: a.An EFL learner might(1)raise the awareness of learning correct ways to express routines and perform the life-long English learning;(2)enhance the college English continuing learning and keep in touch with English itself to avoid the negative influence of interruption of English learning time;(3)reinforce training of expression competence of routines especially for the male learners;b.An English teacher may:(1)concentrate more on the function and effect of continuing education of college English and offer a better learning environment for EFL learners;(2)change and enhance the proportion of routines in the current English teaching syllabus to make EFL learners aware of features and correct expression forms of routines;(3)reform existing assessment forms and contents of English proficiency tests aimed at undergraduates,such as performing more oral tests and man-machine interaction tests to improve EFL learners’ pragmatic competence and intercultural communication competence.