Developing The Ability To Perform Speech Acts In English As A Foreign Language: A Case Study Of Three EFL Learners

The purpose of this one-year longitudinal case study is to describe pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic performance and development of three Chinese EFL learners in the English communicative acts of request, apology and compliment response. Pragmatics plays an important role in intercultural communication since native speakers usually rate pragmatic errors as significantly more severe than linguistic errors. However, it has not received much attention by L2 learners and L2 researchers until the recent twenty years. Speech act ability is an important ability in pragmatics which has received the most attention and is examined in the present study.For this study, the three subjects were asked to respond in English to 12 situations with different social variables first, including four requests, four apologies, and four compliment responses and then Mandarin Chinese responses were also collected each time, at the interval of four months. In order to diminish memorization, different situations were constructed of four times but with almost the same social variables. Sixteen native British English speakers also participated in the-present study in order to provide baseline intra-cultural data. Since native speakers showed stable pragmatic performance, they participated in the first time of test only. The three subjects' oral English data of four times were examined individually to find pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic developmental patterns first and then their pragmatic performance was compared to those of sixteen native speakers in order to identify the learners' deviant realization behaviors from target norms. The data was collected from a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and an open-ended interview. The reliability of data coding was calculated and the interrater reliability was estimated at 95%.In the analysis, strategy and substrategy or adjunct strategy of each speech act were coded, tallied, and analyzed descriptively in terms of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects. The results found that the three subjects did not show obvious increase or decrease pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic developmental patterns of each strategy, substrategy, or adjunct strategy but fluctuant and stable trends were presented. It was also found that the three subjects' English responses were mainly depended on the translation from their Mandarin responses, except formulaic sentences, so differences between the three subjects and English native speakers were mainly caused by negative pragmatic transfer and positive pragmatic transfer led to the appropriate pragmatic performance. The results showed that lower-proficiency learners displayed less positive pragmatic transfer and more negative pragmatic transfer in the L2 production than higher-proficiency learners. Further, L2...