An Investigation into the Interlanguage Pragmatic Competence of Chinese and Japanese Learners of English
203M041 W. Z. Z.
Chapter one discusses the phenomenon that many foreign language learners tend to have less control over the conventions of forms and means used by native speakers in pragmatic performance and often respond in a way unacceptable to their native interlocutors, even in the case of learners with a good command of grammar.
So, these learners' acquirement of the target language is described as interlanguage ? a foreign language learner's separate linguistic system that has a structurally intermediate status between the native and the target language.
Chapter two reviews the language transfer and language socialization theory, assumes that factors like linguistic proficiency, cultural deference, formal instruction and types of input, etc might influence pragmatic performance, then hypothesizes that there are significant differences between Chinese and Japanese English learners' pragmatic performance.
Chapter three deals with methodology. The participants in this study are the first and the third year English majors randomly selected from Mie University and Henan Teachers' University.
This study adopts a kind of Discourse Completion Test (DCT), a popular and efficient data collection method of linguistic research, which requires the participants to read the situations with detailed backgrounds and complete the discourse sequences appropriate for the situations.
Chapter four analyzes the data collected from the DCT by using T-test. The results show that there are no statistically detectable significant differences between Chinese and Japanese learners of English, and that neither the grammatical competence nor the interlanguage pragmatic competence of all the participants' is adequate to ensure successful communications in the target language. Anyway, they have varied degree of awareness about interlanguage pragmatic performance.
Chapter five discusses the possible factors those influence the participants' pragmatic performance like formal instruction, cultural teaching, authentic input, and learning environment, etc to interlanguage pragmatic development. At last, the study suggests that building cultural and pragmatic awareness, creating favorable learning environments, enhancing input, teaching grammar in contexts, giving feedback and practicing can be helpful in developing interlanguage pragmatic competence.