A CONTEXTUAL-SITUATION-BASED STUDY ON RECOGNITION AND EVALUATION TOWARD L2 GRAMMAR AND PRAGMATICS – A CASE STUDY OF YERSIN UNIVERSITY

Abstract

This study attempts to reveal pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence by examining the recognition and evaluation of English-majored students (high-leveled and low-leveled) towards grammar and pragmatics. As the subjects of the study are English-majored students who have hardly studied pragmatics before, the aims of the study are to examine their pragmatic awareness and application and to answer the question whether pragmatics should be officially taught in the Teaching Curriculum. Data were collected via DCT (Discourse Completion Tasks) questionnaire (Bardovi-Harlig & Dornyei, 1998). Independent T-Test was employed for the data analysis. The findings show that the students of high proficiency group could recognize the errors (in general) more than those of low proficiency group (p<.001). Although the high-leveled students can identify the grammatical errors better than the low-leveled ones, there were no significant differences between the students of two groups in pragmatic identification (p=0.19). Hence, both groups have no significant differences in evaluation of the seriousness of pragmatic errors (p=0.54). This can reinforce the need of teaching pragmatics for English-majored students in language classes.