A Study On Pragmatic Failures In Compliments And Responses By Chinese College EFL Students

This thesis presents a study of pragmatic failures in the compliments and responses by Chinese college EFL (English as Foreign Language) learners. Through the analysis and study of the data by DCT, the paper is intended to figure out the factors that influenced or caused the pragmatic failures in compliment speech act by Chinese college EFL students, such as, cultural differences, pragmatic transfer and pragmatic fossilization.The present study is conducted with three groups of subjects: the first group consists of twenty-four Chinese college EFL students of first-year and another forty-two students of third-year as the second one. All the Chinese subjects are EFL students from Ocean University of China. And the third group consists of ten native speakers of English from International Sailing Federation during 2007 Qingdao International Regatta, and their answers with carefulness will be taken as the standard one to test the data of Chinese subjects. Ensuring cross-cultural comparability, it has been decided to obtain the data by use of a controlled elicitation procedure, that is,"Discourse Completion Task"(DCT), in which different compliment situations are effective instruments to test the pragmatic failures. Yu's DCT questionnaire (1999) in which compliment situations are given with gender and social status as contextual variables is taken as reference. After necessary additions and amendments, the DCT questionnaire for the present study consists of twenty situations, half of which requires the subjects to give compliment and the other asks for compliment response to the given situation. The discussion of the results begins with the overall classification of the Chinese EFL students'compliments according to Searle's Speech Act Theory (1969), and their compliment responses are categorized into different strategies based on Herbert's (1986, pp.76-88) taxonomy. The second step is to collect all features of each group on the basis of the examination mainly by descriptive analysis to describe and analyze each group as a whole and thereby obtain a comprehensive picture. Then, based on the standard answers of the English native speakers, comparison between first-year and third-year EFL subjects'data will be made to support the discussion on the relationship between language proficiency and pragmatic competence. The thesis focuses on the study of Chinese subjects'compliments and compliment responses strategies for which quantitative analysis is combined with qualitative analysis to figure out their pragmatic failures.The results show that Chinese college EFL learners'speech act and the engaged strategies of compliment have twofold characteristics: on the one hand, their compliment speech acts and strategies reflect traditional Chinese social cultures and values; on the other hand, Chinese EFL learners try to follow the English social norms in their interlanguage but are still held back by their inadequate pragmatic knowledge on the target language. In terms of the usage of compliment responses strategies, there is an increasing tendency for Chinese subjects to accept a compliment with the employment of"amendment"strategy to make a balance between modesty of themselves and agreement with others. Pragmatic failures committed by the Chinese are found in almost every kind of strategies concerning the compliments and compliment responses. In compliments, strategies with the highest frequency of pragmatic failures are the ones in"direct compliment", and"indirect compliment"strategies rank at the second one. The pragmatic failures committed by the two Chinese groups in terms of compliment show the similar percentage; In compliment responses, the pragmatic failures by the third-year students are found much fewer than that by the first-year students. As for the examination of the relationship between language proficiency and pragmatic failures, the analysis of the results reports that language proficiency could aid the development of pragmatic competence to some extent, but higher language proficiency is not adequate for the development of pragmatic competence, and could not promise to commit no pragmatic failure in a cross-cultural communication.The analyses of the findings show that the causes accounting for the pragmatic failures are complicated: cultural differences is the chief reasons for the pragmatic failures by the different value systems, concepts of face, and communication styles between China and western countries; negative pragmatic transfer can be seen as the direct factor which leads to the pragmatic failures in the communication in English—the Chinese learners tend to transfer the strategies and expressions of their mother tongue to the target language; the phenomenon of pragmatic transfer possibly because of the pragmatic fossilization which refers to the persistent pragmatic errors that formed in the process of inputting as well as in the process of outputting. Moreover, the problems with language teaching are found to be responsible for either the pragmatic transfer or the pragmatic fossilization, thus are accounted as the reason for pragmatic failures in a cross-cultural communication.Analysis of the behaviors of compliments and compliment responses of Chinese college EFL students can give pedagogical implication for our college EFL teaching and learning. The implication mainly focuses on the ways to promote communicative competence as well as to improve relative teaching methods, such as, language teachers need to arouse learners'cultural awareness in the process of English teaching; As for the grammar teaching, if it can be combined with that of pragmatic functions, it will be very helpful for students to use the different linguistic forms appropriately in different situations; In explaining linguistic forms, teachers should also give explanation on the relevant stylistic features and provide information on using the appropriate linguistic forms in given contexts. Moreover, English recordings, videos, films, plays and novels containing authentic conversations are full of indirect speech act but may be difficult for Chinese students to understand. If students can interact with such kind of input under the guidance of teachers, they may become more sensitive in interpreting different speech acts.