On The Relationship Between L2Proficiency And Pragmatic Transfer

Pragmatic transfer can be influenced by various factors such as instructional effect, learning context and proficiency of the target language. Among all these factors, proficiency of the target language has attracted particular attention. Although a number of previous ren the fields of interlanguage pragmatics and second language acquisition (SLA) have focused on how second language (L2) proficiency influences pragmatic transfer, the results remain controversial. There are mainly three types of viewpoints:first, proficiency and pragmatic transfer are positively correlated; second, they are negatively correlated; third, they are not necessarily related.In order to shed some light on this controversial problem, the present study investigated into the relationship between L2proficiency and pragmatic transfer in terms of the contrasts between refusal strategies employed by Chinese native speakers, English native speakers, and Chinese EFL learners at three different proficiency levels.Altogether199participants participated in the present study:40native Chinese speakers,33native English speakers, and124Chinese EFL learners. The124EFL learners were further divided into three groups, namely the Beginner Group, the Intermediate Group and the Advanced Group. The data were collected through a written DCT questionnaire, which was composed of12situations belonging to four stimulus types eliciting a refusal:three requests, three invitations, three offers and three suggestions. Relative power, as an important social parameter, has also been taken into consideration: one of each stimulus type required a refusal to a person of higher status, one required a refusal to a person of equal status, and the other one required a refusal to a person of lower status.After all copies of DCT questionnaires had been collected, the data were coded according to the framework of refusal strategies proposed by Beebe and his colleagues (1990). Then, the relationship between L2proficiency and pragmatic transfer was analyzed by examining the differences in frequency of strategy use among the five groups relating to different types of situations, and upon refusing people of different social status.The present study arrived at three major conclusions as follow:a. Native speakers of Chinese and native speakers of English differed significantly in their realization of refusal. Chinese tended to use more indirect refusal strategies and less direct strategies than English native speakers, and they were significantly more sensitive to the interlocutor’s social status.b. Pragmatic transfer was universal among Chinese EFL learners at all proficiency levels in their use of refusal strategies. However, there were differences in the degree of pragmatic transfer.c. With the increase of their L2proficiency, Chinese EFL learners’pragmatic transfer decreased from the beginner group to the intermediate group and then increased from the intermediate group to the advanced group. Specifically, the beginning learners were prevented from transferring by the limitation of grammatical competence; the intermediate learners transferred much more since they were facilitated by their relatively higher L2proficiency while they had quite limited sociocultural knowledge of the target language; and the advanced learners also transferred little because they their sociocultural knowledge of the target culture enabled them to eliminate the influence of their mother tongue.The results of the present study indicated that Chinese EFL learners’ development of pragmatic competence lagged behind their development of grammatical competence. In regard to this, pedagogical intervention should be necessary to enhance beginning learners’ and intermediate learners’ sociocultural knowledge of the target culture so as to increase their pragmatic awareness. The present study has made contributions to the field of interlanguage pragmatics and SLA both theoretically and practically.