Abstract:

 

Pragmatic competence of routines, as one branch of pragmalinguistic categories and interlanguage pragmatic competence, mainly contains recognition and expression competence (further divided into pragmatic competence of initiating and responding utterances). Therefore, this research is intended to carry out an empirical research to test 227 Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic competence of routines from the perspective of gender difference. The overall subjects will be divided into 2 experimental groups respectively: male group (73) and female group (154). Research results can be preliminary reached as follows: (1) overall pragmatic competence of routines of all subjects is in a relatively low level; (2) there surely exists a significant correlation between male and female groups (female subjects perform better than male ones on the whole) but male subjects partially do better than female ones in some speech acts; (3) there is no significant correlation between the two groups in recognition competence of routines but exists a statistical significance in expression and overall pragmatic competence of routines, however, to some extent, male subjects also perform better than female ones in certain speech acts; (4) a significant correlation indeed exists between these two groups (female subjects perform better than male ones as a whole) in pragmatic competence of initiating and responding utterances while male subjects should also perform better than female ones in some specific speech acts. Apart from this, some practical conclusions for further improving Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic competence of routines can be obtained and valuable suggestions for future research will be drawn as well after a series of analyses and discussions in this research.  

​

Key words: Chinese EFL learners; pragmatic competence; routines; gender difference; speech act