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Chapter One Introduction Object of the Study When an EFL learner learns English, his or her aim is to use it in the actual communication. Many experts believe that a full understanding of how formal properties are learnt will not be achieved without examining the way in which these properties are used in actual communication, and most linguists agree that to learn a foreign language well, it is not enough to master only vocabulary and grammar, and more importance should be attached to the pragmatic competence of the foreign language (Boxer 1995; Ervin-Tripp 1972; Thomas 1983; Wolfson 1989). In China, lots of EFL students have a good command of English vocabulary and grammar, and they could even get high scores in CET, TOEFL or GRE, but they cannot communicate with native speakers in the proper way in real situations. It seems that Chinese EFL students’ pragmatic competence is not as good as their linguistic competence. Many studies have been carried out on this. Zhong, Fan, and Qin (2001) test one hundred and fifty non-English majors who have passed CET Band 4, only to find that the correlation between Chinese EFL students’ linguistic competence and socio-cultural competence is very low. The studies by Wang (1995), Yang (2001), and Gao (2002) show that those who have high linguistic competence do not necessarily have high pragmatic competence, and for lack of pragmatic competence, they are liable to commit pragmatic errors and fail in cross-cultural communication. The importance of pragmatic competence has been demonstrated by many researchers (Boxer 1995; Ervin-Tripp 1972; Thomas 1983; Wolfson 1989) whose work reveals that native speakers often forgive the phonological syntactic and lexical errors committed by L2 speakers, but they are less likely to forgive pragmatic errors. Native speakers would negatively interpret pragmatic errors committed by L2 speakers as arrogance, impatience, rudeness, and so forth. Therefore, target language pragmatic competence is es