Abstract：Abstract:By employing the multimedia elicitation task, appropriateness judgment task and retrospective interview, this study investigated 50 Chinese nonEnglish major postgraduates competence in producing and understanding English routines. The results showed that: 1) the participants could not produce nativelike routines in certain contexts, but their utterances could be accepted by native speakers; 2) they could not fully understand the appropriate use of routines, due to insufficient English metapragmatic awareness and neglect of the multifunctionality of routines. The study suggests that teachers should enhance explicit teaching of routines, focus on the variances in different forms of routines with the same pragmatic function, and provide as many language materials containing various routines as possible.
