This study investigates the predictive relationships among the evaluations of grammatical and pragmatic components on overall quality evaluation of EFL learners language use. It has been widely accepted that language learners grammatical and pragmatic competence are largely separate and the former does not guarantee the latter. The present study aims at investigating to what extent those two aspects of learners second language realized in their letter writing account for the overall evaluation of the writing. It specifically examines the native speaker judges evaluations of the learners writing skills realized in email business letters. The results of data analysis shows that, although both components affected the overall evaluations of the writing, the pragmatic component was more a deciding factor to determine overall proficiency evaluation than the grammatical component. From this result, it is concluded that even for learners with very limited grammatical competence, as the participants in the present study, the pragmatic aspect influences more on deciding the overall quality of the learners letter writings.
1. Introduction
2. Literature Review
3. The Study
4. Results and Discussions
5. Conclusion