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A Corpus-based Study of Pragmatic Competence of English Preservice Teachers: Taking Error Types of Request Speech Act as an Example
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Abstract
The existing literature on pragmatic competence has implied the significance of improving second language learners’ pragmatic competence to achieve effective communication. However, limited research has examined pragmatic competence from the perspective of error types, let alone focusing on the special group, preservice teachers. To that end, this study investigated how error types contribute to analyzing pragmatic competence. An online Discourse Completion Test (DCT) containing 14 real request scenarios is sent to 60 participants to fill out. Results indicated that pragmatic failure takes up the largest proportion part of the error types. In addition, although there is not a significant difference on grammatical mistakes or pragmatic failures in different grades. The frequency of some sub-items is significantly different across two groups, namely: 1) incorrect use of verbs; 2) redundancy or lack of words; 3) Hedged sentence. The findings shed light on second language learning and teaching in that educators might consider developing pre-service teachers’ pragmatic competence based on this research results so that they can be pragmatically competent and understand how to incorporate the pragmatic component of the language into second language instruction.
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How to cite this paper
A Corpus-based Study of Pragmatic Competence of English Preservice Teachers: Taking Error Types of Request Speech Act as an Example
How to cite this paper: Lingwei Li. (2024). A Corpus-based Study of Pragmatic Competence of English Preservice Teachers: Taking Error Types of Request Speech Act as an Example.The Educational Review, USA, 8(5), 769-778.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/er.2024.05.023
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