Development Of Chinese EFL Students' L2 Pragmatic Competence

The relationship between linguistic proficiency and pragmatic competence of EFL/ESL learners remains a controversial issue. Some researchers hold that they do not affect each other (e.g., Olshtain&Blum-Kulka, 1985), while others report a certain relationship between them, although the nature of the relationship is not clear (e.g., Trosborg, 1987; Takahashi&Beebe, 1987). The studies on learning environment strongly support the notion that environment is a major variable in the development of pragmatic and grammatical competence: The EFL environment promoted the development of grammatical competence at the expense of pragmatic competence, and the ESL environment produced the opposite effect (e.g., Schmidt, 1983; Rover, 1996; Bardovi-Harlig and Dornyei, 1998, etc.). However, FL environment itself is only a cover term that subsumes different subcategories: country and city. So far, no empirical studies have been focused on the different L1 environments and the question whether different L1 pragmatic environments will have different effects on the development of Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic competence is left unanswered.This study is an attempt to probe into these two questions by investigating the role of linguistic proficiency and L1 pragmatic environment in Chinese EFL learners' development of pragmatic competence when using target speech acts in social interactions. In addition, the issue of the effects of different L1 pragmatic environments on the negative pragmatic transfer is also examined.One hundred and twenty-two Chinese EFL students participated in the studies. They were divided into 3 groups representing 3 proficiency levels according to the scores they obtained in a vocabulary size test and 2 groups representing country and city environments respectively. The participant were first required to do the judgment task on the target speech acts (i.e., request, response to compliments, response to refusal, etc.) and then provide the appropriate answers or reason(s) for the judgments they gave to each test item. Besides, some items were selected to examine the participants' negative pragmatic transfer. Thus, three types of data were collected. They were: (1) the participants' performance on the judgment task, (2) the...