An Empirical Study Of Chinese EFL Learners’ Interlanguage Pragmatic Development Based On Criticism Speech Act

Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) is an interface inquiry generated by theconnections between pragmatics and second language acquisition. Research on ILP hasstarted in the1980s; influenced by study of cross-cultural pragmatics, the focus of ILPresearch has predominantly been on non-native learners’ second language use; littlewas discussed on L2pragmatic acquisition or pragmatic development. Therefore, theissue of interlanguage pragmatic development by non-native speakers has beenneglected for a long time.Following a cross-sectional design, the present study elicited the data on speechact of criticizing by intermediate, advanced and proficient learners via a discoursecompletion task. By modifying the criticism analysis framework made by Nguyen andsome other scholars, an adapted coding scheme used for present study was constructedand then utilized to code the collected data. The SPSS13.0statistical devices such asOne-way ANOVA and Kruskal-Wallis test were adopted to analyze learners’ criticismstrategies, criticism formulae, external modification and internal modification,examining the interlanguage pragmatic development patterns of speech act ofcriticizing by Chinese learners of English. The major findings are summarized asfollows:(1) Regarding criticism strategies, it was found that learners at three proficiencylevels all showed higher frequency of employment in indirect criticism strategies thanthe direct ones. With the increasing proficiency level, learners’ use of direct criticismstrategies gradually decreased in number. However, learners didn’t differ significantlyin both their use of the direct criticism strategies and the indirect criticism strategies.(2) With regard to the criticism formulae (CFs), learners’ criticism strategies wererealized by the most frequent five major criticism formulae including request, advice,hint, suggestion and enquiry and the other16minor categories such as instructing,demand, giving reasons, disapproval, warning and so on. Each criticism formulasdiffered in its distribution among different groups. The results of Kruskal-Wallis testfor all CFs revealed that there was no significant difference among groups except boththe hint and advice. In addition, no significant difference was found for the learners’choice of CFs type, which indicated that learners, irrespective of their proficiencylevel, can reach the full range of taxonomy of criticism strategies appeared in codingscheme. (3) Concerning the external modification (EM) of criticisms, learners indicated asignificant difference in the total number of EM. Specifically,“grounder” and“address” were preferred by all groups, followed by “apology”,“steer” and“sweetener” in a descending order. When compared the subcategories of EM amonggroups, the results showed that the learners differed only in their use of “grounder”.(4) Concerning the internal modification of criticisms (IM), learners also differedsignificantly in their total number of IM. For syntactic modifiers, the proficientlearners outperformed both the intermediate and advanced learners (e.g. modality). Forlexical modifiers, the learners’ frequency of understaters and downtoners increasedwith their proficiency level, meanwhile, they differed significantly in thesesubcategories of internal modification. No difference was found in their use of othersubcategories of IM, such as subjectivizers, consultatives, cajolers, appealers andpoliteness marker.(5) On sociopragmatic level, no distinctive pragmatic development was embodiedboth in learners’ choice of criticism strategies and criticism modification. Irrespectiveof the learners’ proficiency level, they used modification devices more or less to softenthe face threat to hearer. This finding suggests that the learners were aware of thepossible face damage in such a face-threatening speech act of criticizing and employedcriticism modifiers to reduce the offense to the hearer. On pragmalinguistic level, theproficiency level had an effect on total number of IM, syntactic modifier like modality,lexical downgrader including hedges，undersaters and downtoners, and choice ofactual wording in CFs and IM. For example, in suggestion strategy, the intermediategroup (IG) confined to simple syntactic structure like you can＋V, whereas theadvanced group (AG) and proficiency group (PG) employed a wider range of linguisticforms to realize suggestion. Another example concerning learners’ choice of words inunderstaters demonstrated that the IG tended to employ only a few structures such as afew, a little; whereas the AG made use of some and not very plus the structuresoccurred in IG; compared to the two former groups, the PG made a wider use ofvarious IM realization structures.The above findings showed that the major differences among three groups existedin the use of modification rather than in their choice of criticism strategies andcriticism formulae. While there was no distinct indication of pragmatic developmentalstage, evidence partly proved the five-stage development hypothesis proposed byKasper and Rose. Learners at different proficiency levels displayed differentinterlanguage pragmatic features in expressing criticisms. For the intermediate, their criticisms featured as plain and short in length of utterance, and fewer modification;for the advanced, the more use of modification and more longer utterance wereemployed; As for the proficient learners, they manifested the best control of languagesources.