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© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.

Abstract

The present study aimed to examine the effect of proficiency on the pragmatic comprehension of speech acts, implicatures, and routines, as well as the way learners of different proficiency levels employ strategies when comprehending a pragmatic task. Thirty-three high-proficiency and forty-one low-proficiency Chinese learners of English completed a multiple-choice discourse completion task (MDCT). Of the participants, six were selected from the two proficiency groups to perform verbal retrospections to probe their strategy use in the MDCT task. The quantitative results showed that the high-proficiency group performed significantly better than the low-proficiency group on speech acts, implicatures, and routines. In addition, the analyses of verbal reports identified eight major strategies the learners used while performing the task, including sociopragmatics, hearer’s response, relevance, keyword/key phrase, life experience/world knowledge, amount of information, intuition, and multiple strategies. The high-proficiency group showed a significant use of multiple strategies, life experience/world knowledge, amount of information and relevance. The low-proficiency group, on the other hand, indicated a significant use of intuition. Close examination further revealed that the high-proficiency group showed more flexibility in strategy use, thus leading to more accurate performance. Conversely, the low-proficiency group did not vary their strategy use, which normally led to incorrect responses on the task. Finally, the study closes by providing pedagogical implications for language teachers as to how strategy instruction can be implemented in L2 pragmatics classrooms.

Details

Title
The Effects of L2 Proficiency on Pragmatic Comprehension and Learner Strategies
Author
Hsuan-Yu, Tai 1   VIAFID ORCID Logo  ; Yuan-Shan, Chen 2 

 Language Center, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung 41170, Taiwan; [email protected] 
 Department of Applied English, National Chin-Yi University of Technology, Taichung 41170, Taiwan 
First page
174
Publication year
2021
Publication date
2021
Publisher
MDPI AG
e-ISSN
22277102
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
2531377522
Copyright
© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.