Interlanguage Pragmatics

Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) studies interlanguage learners?ability to understand and perform speech acts as well as the development of the ability. This is a rather new emergence which may be included in the field of cross-cultural pragmatics, and at the same time, as a branch of second language acquisition research. Since its birth, it has been a fascination for language researchers, teachers and linguistic students, and valuable findings have been obtained concerning interlanguage learners? pragmatic performance that shed light on their pragmatice competence, which is part of their communicative competence. However, these previous studies mainly involve second language learners of English from several western linguistic and cultural backgrounds, while English learners of oriental cultures are seldom attended to (except Japanese). To help make the present studies on interlanguage pragmatics more overall and improve the English study of Chinese learners, this dissertation, by reviewing the literature of interlanguage pragmatics and discussing some relatively important issues, makes some illuminating suggestions, which are quite useful and can be applied in English language learning and teaching in China. Besides, the dissertation expounds the concept ragmatic competence?from a new angle, classifies the pragmatic failures in a new way, and analyses the main causes for pragmatic failure. In order to make the study more objective and reliable, an empirical investigation with some supplementary observations has also been made, the results of which lend support to the previous studies. In view of the Chinese students?deficiency in using English language, the dissertation argues that pragmatic competence, as an individual part of communicative competence, should be kept as the most important goal for English learners, and puts forward some remedial measures from textbook writing or compiling to the language teaching, which can certainly do good to interlanguage pragmatics research and English language teaching. This dissertation is composed of seven chapters. Introduction briefly states why the studying emphasis of second language acquisition research shifts from linguistic aspects to pragmatic or discourse aspects, and asserts that successful language acquisition involves the learners?ability to interpret and produce contextually appropriate speech acts. Chapter One is a general introduction to interlanguage pragmatics and some important issues are also discussed, including its definition, scope and domains, three important theories underlying the interlanguage pragmatics (ILP): speech act theory, conversational implicature theory, and politeness principle. Chapter Two, based on the first chapter, expounds the phenomenon of cross- cultural miscommunication, or in Thomas?(1983) term, pragmatic failure. The causes of pragmatic failure are discussed, too. This chapter also explains pragmatic competence as a part of communicative competence, with which people are capable of avoiding communicative failures and even enhancing their interpersonal rapport with the interlocutors. Chapter Three gives a brief account of some research methods, such as the rating tasks, multiple choice questionnaire, discourse completion test, role plays, naturally- occurring conversation observation and the combined methods of data collection. Chapter Four describes the purpose, subjects, data collection method, format, content and procedures of the questionnaire investigation...