Negative Pragmatic Transfer In Compliment Responses By Chinese College-level English Learners

The purpose of the present study is to investigate the employment of the strategies among the Chinese college-level English learners in responding to compliments and the negative pragmatic transfer involved in their responses, and examine the relationship between negative pragmatic transfer and the learners'levels of English proficiency. For this study, 120 Chinese college-level English learners were tested as subjects to respond in English to 8 different situations. Data for this investigation were collected through a written questionnaire in the form of the"Discourse Completion Test". The results show that the subjects tend to apply"Accepting"strategy in their responding to compliments and there does exist negative pragmatic transfer. The number of negative pragmalinguistic transfer made by low proficiency level subjects is almost twice as that of the subjects with high level of English proficiency, which means negative pragmalinguistic transfer is closely associated with levels of English proficiency. There is no significant difference on negative sociopragmatic transfer between the subjects with different levels of English proficiency.