An Investigation On English Pragmatic Competence Of Middle School Students

Pragmatic competence is the capacity of people to achieve the expected communicative purpose by adopting appropriate language forms and communication strategies in a specific context.Since it serves as a significant part of communicative competence,the lack of pragmatic competence will lead to pragmatic failure,which will further cause communication failures.In order to realize successful communication,on the one hand,learners need to master linguistic knowledge;on the other hand,they should be able to properly apply linguistic knowledge,which in other words is to have the pragmatic competence.Under the boom of cross-cultural communication,the pragmatic competence of second language learners has caught the extensive attention of scholars at home and abroad.Most of the former research objects are English majors with different mother tongues and few of the former research involve the second language learners with a lowproficiency.As a core subject of middle school education,the cultivation of pragmatic competence of middle school students is of vital importance for their further English acquisition.In order to explore the current situation of middle school students’ pragmatic competence in English,the author conducted an investigation,mainly focusing on the following questions:What is the current level of middle school students’ pragmatic competence?What is the relationship between pragmatic competence and linguistic proficiency?What are the causes of pragmatic failures of middle school students?In this paper,200 middle school students in Number 13 and Number 31 middle school of Xuzhou were investigated by questionnaires and interviews.The questionnaire consists of two parts,one is to test students’ pragmatic competence by designing questions,and the other is to reflect the development of students’ pragmatic competence by investigating students’ pragmatic awareness.Then,based on the scores of pragmatic competence test,20 students were selected for interviews to grasp the students’ mastery of pragmatic knowledge,the causes of pragmatic failure and the habits of their English learning.In addition,the students’ linguistic level was tested to explore the relationship between pragmatic competence and linguistic proficiency.The findings can be read in three aspects.First,the overall level of middle school students’ pragmatic competence is relatively low,which is reflected in that there are many pragmatic failures in their speech acts,politeness and conversational meaning,etc.;that the pragmatic strategies used in the speech act of request and apology are rather single;that the students’ pragmatic awareness is weak,and the enthusiasm to improve their pragmatic competence is somewhat dampened.Second,the pragmatic competence and linguistic proficiency enjoy a positive correlation,however,linguistic proficiency is not the only factor affecting pragmatic competence.Third,from the results of the pragmatic tests,it is found that the main causes of pragmatic failure are the misuse of expressions due to the violation of English idioms,the negative transfer due to the ignorance of cultural gap,the incomplete mastery of cooperative principles,politeness principles and the negligence of context.