Pragmatic Transfer In Chinese EFL Refusals Of Different Proficiency Levels

The present thesis presents a survey of pragmatic transfer that occurs in expressing refusals by Chinese EFL learners with three different proficiency levels. It aims at justifying the fact that pragmatic transfer exists in the refusals made by English learners of different proficiency levels. Besides, the thesis has explored the influence of language proficiency on pragmatic transfer so that both English learning and teaching in China can benefit from the findings of the research.Three groups of subjects participated in this study: 30 native speakers of Chinese (making refusals in Chinese), 31 native speakers of American English (making refusals in English), 124 Chinese EFL learners which includes 43 beginners, 42 learners with intermediate level of the language and 39 advanced learners (making refusals in English). Data collection is based on a written discourse completion test which elicited refusals of requests, offers, invitations and suggestions from interlocutors of different status (i.e., higher, equal and lower status). Based on the refusal taxonomy of Takahashi and Beebe (1987:55-131) the data were categorized and analyzed in terms of the frequency and content of the semantic formulas used by the subjects. The learners'refusals were compared with those of native speakers of Chinese and English in order to examine the extent of pragmatic transfer from Chinese to English.The result indicates that English learners with different language proficiency do show distinctive pragmatic transfer when they make refusals in target language. Further, pragmatic transfer increases as learners'proficiency increases, supporting Takahashi and Beebe(1987:55-131)'s positive correlation hypothesis in that since more proficient learners have enough control over the target language to express sentiments of their native language at the pragmatic level, they are more likely to transfer their native language socio-cultural norms than less proficiency learners who are hindered from transferring complex native language pragmatics due to their limited target language knowledge.The following two points account for such phenomenon of pragmatic transfer: three folds of the concept of proficiency,namely, grammatical competence, socio-linguistic competence and strategic competence, and the main model of recent English teaching. Besides, based on the findings in the present research suggestions and solutions have been put forward for teaching and learning pragmatics in EFL classroom.