Pragmatic Transfer In Compliments Responses By Chinese College EFL Learners

Compliment is the speaker’s praise or flattery of the addressee and the addressee oftenanswer the speaker through the speech act of compliment response. In most speech communities,compliment is a widely used speech act. Foreign language learners with insufficient pragmaticknowledge unconsciously applied pragmatic norms of their mother tongue to foreign languageand cause pragmatic transfer from native language to foreign language. On the contrary, learnersalso transfer the language patterns or politeness principles of foreign language to their mothertongue.Firstly, this thesis reviews relevant studies of pragmatic transfer, pragmatic norms,politeness principles, compliment response strategies and pragmatic transfer in complimentresponses. Then, it compares compliment responses of native English speakers and Chinesecollege EFL learners. Finally, it comes to the analysis of pragmatic transfer in complimentresponses in both languages, and the discussion of the causal factors for pragmatic transfer incompliment responses by Chinese college EFL learners.In the present study, three questions are proposed before the research:(1) What is the evidence for pragmatic transfer existing in the speech act of complimentresponses?(2) Is there any correlation between EFL learners’ language proficiency and the degree ofpragmatic transfer among Chinese college students？(3) What are the causal factors for pragmatic transfer in compliment response of ChineseCollege EFL learners?Discourse Completion Test as data collection method is employed in this survey, interviewand observation were applied as supplement during the data collection and analysis. The DCTquestionnaire has been conducted among four different groups of256subjects.64Non-Englishmajor juniors form Group One; Group Two involves64English major postgraduates. Thesubjects of the first two groups all come from Wuhan University of Science and Technology. Thenon-English major juniors represent the learners of low English proficiency, while the studentswho are recruited from postgraduates majoring in English, represent learners of advancedEnglish proficiency. Group Three consist of64monolingual speakers of Chinese and64nativeAmericans from the U.S. form Group Four. The feedback of data collected from the abovementioned subjects was categorized according to Herbert’s taxonomy (1986). Firstly, acomparison between the realization strategies of compliment responses in Chinese and English ismade. Then, the discussion of pragmatic transfer and the causal factors for pragmatic transfer incompliment responses by Chinese college EFL learners was conducted.After analysis of the collected data from DCT questionnaire, interview and observation, the study has found:(1) In compliment responses of English, the agreement percentages of Chinese college EFLlearners’ compliment responses in their target language are lower than that of native AmericanEnglish speakers, which indicates that Chinese college EFL learners have the tendency oftransferring pragmatic norms in their mother tongue to the use of foreign language. Meanwhile,the agreement percentages of Chinese college EFL learners’ compliment responses in English arehigher than that of monolingual Chinese speakers, which indicates that Chinese college EFLlearners also have the tendency of transferring pragmatic norms in English to their use of nativelanguage.(2) The study further found that responding strategy selection has relation with the learners’English level: the degree of negative pragmatic transfer decreases with the improvement ofChinese college EFL learners’ English proficiency.(3) Due to the influence of different values and pragmatic norms in different languageculture, addressees apply different strategies in their compliment responses in accordance withdifferent value judgments.From the results of the study, it shows that through a long period of English learning,Chinese students have become consciously aware that it is necessary to employ differentstrategies when they are responding to compliments in English. Nevertheless, there still existpragmatic transfer and the types of agreement strategies of English learners were monotonous tosome extent, it indicates that the pragmatic competence of learners still needs to be enhanced inpresent English teaching in China. The study makes an inquiry into pragmatic transfer in thespeech act of Chinese EFL learners’ responding to compliments. It also provides some practicalsuggestions for foreign language teachers. The results and discussion of the thesis may shedsome light on researches in the field of cross-cultural communication and foreign languageteaching.