A Study of the Interrelationship of Pragmatic and Grammatical Awareness in Taiwanese EFL Context

• Main Authors: Hsiang-Han Huang, 黃湘涵
• Other Authors: Miao-Hsia Chang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/70623214479100851687

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 98 === The role of interlanguage pragmatics has become increasingly important in communicative competence since it is a subfield of second language acquisition and focusing on how second/foreign language learners acquire pragmatic knowledge. Recent studies have been addressing the issue of pragmatic acquisition and pragmatic awareness. However, the interrelatedness of pragmatic and grammatical awareness has been neglected. Therefore, the present study aimed to bridge the gap and had two purposes. One was to investigate whether the EFL learners could recognize and rate the degree of infelicities in grammatical and pragmatic use of the target language. The other was to know if learners’ levels of proficiency influenced their error recognition abilities and the degree of severity ratings. A total of 80 participants took part in the present study. The participants included four groups of speakers: 20 native speakers of English, 20 High level EFL learners, 20 H-intermediate level learners, and 20 of Intermediate level. The data for the present study were elicited with the combined video-and-questionnaire instrument as well as interviews. The video-and-questionnaire instrument once developed by Bardovi-Harlig and Dornyei (1998) was partially adopted and modified. The 15 items in both the video scenarios and written questionnaire contained three categories: sentences that were pragmatically appropriate but ungrammatical, sentences that were grammatical but pragmatically inappropriate, and sentences that did not contain any errors and inappropriateness. The participants were required to watch each scene in the video twice and judge whether the targeted utterance was appropriate/correct by marking yes or no, then they were asked to judge the severity of the error/appropriateness by a six-part scale. After the subjects finished the task, they were given two interview questions related to their feelings toward the two error types and the influence of personal backgrounds. Therefore, both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted for gaining deeper insights. Both the quantitative and qualitative results showed that in error recognition, the Intermediate-level learners recognized more pragmatic errors than they did in grammatical items. Besides, I also found that learners’ grammatical competence became steady and had no significant progress after when they reached the H-intermediate level. As for the error ratings, the findings revealed that both NS and EFL learners considered pragmatic infelicities more serious than grammatical ones. The findings also implied that EFL learners’ levels of proficiency only had significant impact on learners’ grammatical awareness rather than pragmatic awareness. Furthermore, the interview data indicated that as more teachers provided students with more pragmatic knowledge in class, students tended to have better chances to apply it to authentic situations. This study provided implications and suggestions for future research. In spite of some limitations, the present study has shed light on the field of pragmatic awareness and interlanguage pragmatics. It could also serve as a reference in EFL teaching in Taiwan.