Abstract

Pragmatic competence has been quite an important issue in cross-cultural communication and has been one of the most significant objectives of EFL learning and teaching. There have been some important studies on the pragmatic competence of Chinese college EFL learners. Whereas seldom have the previous studies investigated the ethnic minority students’ pragmatic competence on the basis of CSE. This study recruits 162 ethnic minority students and adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods to conduct the research. The research finds out that there is a significant difference between ethnic minority students and non-ethnic minority students and the main reasons for the difference include negative transfer from both native ethnic language and Mandarin Chinese, cultural differences and different way of thinking. The main findings of the research are to give English teachers a reference of how to improve students’ pragmatic competence in cross-cultural communication and may be of some benefit to the EFL learning and teaching in ethnic minority areas and to the policy formulation of education department.

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