Pragmatic Transfer And Strategies In Request-Making By Chinese Learners Of English

This study is going to investigate the strategies and pragmatic transfer in request-making by Chinese Learners of English. It has three aims: (1) to discover similarities and differences in request-making between native English speakers and Chinese Learners of English, (2) to provide empirical evidence for or against the existing theories of pragmatic transfer in request-making, (3) to reveal differences of social values between the two groups. The research, under the guidance of the theories of pragmatic transfer, mainly studies the negative pragmatic transfer in the use of requests by the Chinese learners of English from the point of cross-cultural communication and analyzed it from the aspects of pragma-linguistic transfer and socio-pragmatic transfer, also the reasons are discussed.The data collected mainly from three groups of subjects: Chinese learners of English in L2, native Chinese speakers in L1 and native English speakers in L1 in the form of discourse completion task and interviews. The data of each subject are collected and analyzed by SPSS 11.0. The results show that Chinese learners of English use imperatives more frequently than native English speakers in most of the situations. In addition, in request-making, they do transfer the request patterns, lexical and semantic formulas from their native language into English, and learners with high English proficiency still would make negative pragmatic transfer, but the pragma-linguistic ones are significantly reduced, they make socio-pragmatic transfer unconsciously, which is hard to avoid, what's more, comparing with native English speakers, Chinese learners of English are more influenced by the social power, which is one of the main causes of the frequent socio-pragmatic transfer by Chinese learners of English from Chinese to English.Finally, the reasons for pragmatic transfer in expressing request by Chinese learners of English are discussed. It is hoped that through the comparison between the native language and culture with the target language and Culture may contribute to the English language teaching and cross-cultural communication.