An Exploratory Study Of Interlanguage Pragmatic Development

The research on interlanguage pragmatics originated in the early 1980s. Blum-Kulka and Kasper are among the first group of researchers probing into this field. With more and more researchers focusing on intlerlanguage pragmatics, more research topics have been treated of and different viewpoints contend for coexisting. However, the case at home is not as prosperous and inspiring as it is abroad.Based on what has been reported by previous studies, this thesis explores the interlanguage pragmatic developmental patterns of three groups of Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners. The main purpose is to study the influence of language proficiency, learners'L1 etc. on learners'interlanguage pragmatic development, and to verify the related results of previous researches.In review of the related literature, this research is divided into four stages:Firstly, we constructed a preliminary questionnaire in Chinese to a group of 20 freshmen. The preliminary questionnaire provided one example of a request, apology, and a compliment (to generate compliment-response scenarios), each of these followed by five numbered lines to be filled in with the most recent requests, apologies, and compliments the students had made or witnessed. All the subjects finished the questionnaires, thus generating approximately 100 potential scenarios for each of the desired speech acts.Secondly, based on the pool of scenarios from the preliminary questionnaire, 10 most frequently mentioned items from each speech act were selected to develop our DCT. In the DCT, a short description of each scenario was provided in Chinese to elicit the subjects'potential responses. The description embraces most of the social relationships in actual verbal communication to provide learners with enough information.Thirdly, the subjects were required to finish the questionnaires randomly assigned to them either in Chinese or in English according to the requirement in each questionnaire with a time limit of 50 minutes. Then, based on the coding schemes provided by previous researchers, the frequencies of strategy types were classified and calculated. From the frequency distribution of different strategy types, we obtained the empirical conclusions.And lastly, to verify these empirical conclusions, the data obtained from these experiments were examined through the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS 10.0) statistical analysis system. Procedures as descriptive statistics, Pearson product-moment correlation, t-test for independent samples, paired sample and one-way ANOVA have been adopted.Totally 120 subjects, evenly divided into three groups of 40, took part in this study. The subjects were chosen from three different levels according to their language learning experience. The first two groups were from Zhongshan Number One Middle School. They were junior high school students and senior high school students respectively. Students from the third group were freshmen from the National University of Defense Technology.Through this study, we have reached the following conclusions:1. A number of developmental patterns are revealed among the three groups of students, particularly in the movement from direct to conventionally indirect request strategies, and in the higher frequency of supportive moves, a higher frequency and wider range of adjuncts for higher level of English learners in apology adjuncts, and compliment-response adjuncts for the higher proficiency groups.2. The same structural forms for conveying requests would be available in both English and Chinese.3. Although the data reveal little evidence of situational variation for the lower proficiency learners for any of the speech acts, the group of university students is more sensitive to social and situational factors, which may indicate their relative developmental patterns in social pragmatics. This indicates the precedence of pragmalinguistics over sociolpragmatics in the early stages of pragmatic development in a second or foreign language.4. Compared with the data elicited from the Chinese, data show there is little evidence of L1 pragmatic transfer but more evidence of the pragmatic development of English;5. Study of request strategies shows that the lack of homogeneity exists across learners within the U-1 group. 6. There is no positive correlation between the higher score and the higher frequency of supportive moves in requests by applying SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences), which can also protest that the participants'high English score in National College Entrance Examination can't stand for their actual target language competence, at least their pragmatic competence.The object of this research is not to offer a completely new theory but to study Chinese students'target language pragmatic development. So the current study is of great significance. Firstly, the thesis contributes to the study of IL pragmatic, especially to the developmental patterns of pragmatic in second or foreign language learning. Secondly, it also provides some pedagogical implication for our foreign language education. Owing to the validity of the self-designed questionnaire and the complexity of the study of learners, some remaining research problems as well as directions for future research have been pointed out at the final part of the thesis.