A Contextual-situation-based case study on Recognition and Evaluation towards L2 Grammar and Pragmatics

Success communication requires more than good command of language, e.g. vocabulary and grammar. Thus, it is essential to equip learners of language with both the language and the knowledge of how to use it. This study examines the recognition and evaluation of English-majored students (high-leveled and low-leveled) towards Grammar and Pragmatics. Since the subjects of the study are English-majored students who have never studied Pragmatics before, the aim of the study is to answer the question whether Pragmatics should be taught. 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= 0.000). 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 2 groups in pragmatic identification (p= 0.185). Hence, both groups have no significant differences in the evaluation of seriousness of pragmatic errors (p=548). This can suggest the need of teaching pragmatic knowledge for English-majored students in language classes. Keywords: Pragmatics, Grammar, identification, evaluation