| The intuitive mastery that the native speakers possess to use and interpret language appropriately in the process of interaction and in relation to social context which has been called by Hymes (1972) and others "communicative competence", a concept which has in recent years been widely accepted in language pedagogy. In Hymes' much quoted formulation, it is a competence "when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner" (Hymes, 1972: 277), which suggests that language teaching should recognize a social, interpersonal and cultural dimension and attribute to it at least just as much importance as to the grammatical or phonological aspect. ?Acquiring communicative competence is an important goal in language instruction. In the course of English language teaching, the teachers are supposed to enable the students to use language in communicatively effective and appropriate ways. However, college students with the experience of six or more years of English studying have been found to have considerable difficulty in coping with language in its normal communicative use. In interaction with native English speakers, they often make mistakes which result from lack of knowledge of cross-cultural differences. As a consequence, much importance should be attached to cross-cultural differences in foreign language teaching and learning.As an aspect of cross-culturally communicative competence, apologies often constitute a troublesome aspect of English for learners from the Chinese cultural background. Frequent occurrence of apologies in English puzzles Chinese students so much that they even don't know what on earth can be called offenses which will result inapologies in the English contexts. In fact, they lack the ability to interpret the social and cultural meanings implicit in apologies. Therefore, there is a great necessity to examine the apologies in English and Chinese, through which their awareness of cross-cultural differences can be increased and communicative competence can be enhanced.There are some studies available in the sociolinguistic literature, which have dealt with apologies in the English context (Holmes, 1990; Owen, 1983; Fraser, 1981). We find, unfortunately, very little research on Chinese apologies, much less the comparison and contrast of apologies in the two remote cultures. The present dissertation, based on some insights from sociolinguistics, ethnography of speaking, cross-cultural communication and pragmatics, addresses itself to the exploration of the common properties and discrepancies of English and Chinese apologies, convincing us of the fact that apologies, as a shared phenomenon in the English and Chinese cultures, differ in the choice of remedial exchanges, responses and some aspects of the sociolinguistic distribution of apologies as the cultures vary.In this dissertation our attention is directed towards different aspects of apologies in English and Chinese. Two questionnaires were used to analyze the similarities and differences of apologies in these two cultures. One contributed to apologetic formula (questionnaire 1) and the other to apology distributions in 6 offense types (questionnaire 2). These two questionnaires were used among 50 students of Qiongzhou University where I work. Questionnaire 1 consisted of 8 situations, from which Chinese data were received. The corresponding English data were quoted in Owen (1983). Questionnaire 2 consisted of 12 situations, of which every two contributed to one offense type. All these 12 situations, once used by Holmes (1990) to get his English data, were used to get the corresponding Chinese data. The fourth situation, describing S bumping into an elderly lady in a busy market, was chosen as a special situation to find out the actual realization of apology strategies in both cultures. The data analysis was mainly displayed in Chapters Four and Five.This dissertation falls into six chapters.Chapter One presents a general introduction to the whole dissertation. The purpose of the re...
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