A Comparison Of Interlanguage Speech Act Of Apology Between Chinese Learners Of English And Native Speakers (Chinese And English)

This study uses Discourse Completion Tests created by Blum-Kulka et al. (1982) as the instrument to investigate the realizations of apology speech act performed by relatively high proficiency and low proficiency English learners compared with both English native and Chinese native speakers. The participants involved in this study are divided into four groups. The first group of English native speakers (NE) consists of 22 natives who either live in America or U.K. or study or teach in Nanjing. The second group (E2H) has 12 relatively high proficiency English learners from English department of Nanjing University of Technology, namely, the sophomores of English majors. The third group (E2L) has 12 low proficiency English learners and they are the 1st grade non-English majors from the College of Materials and Engineering in Nanjing University of Technology. The last group is the group of Chinese native speakers (NC) composed of 24 native speakers of Chinese, the same participants who participated in the E2H and E2L groups.This study shows that there are similarities as well as discrepancies between the realizations of apology speech act and the potential cultural differences. In addition, the realizations of apology speech act performed by relatively high proficiency English learners are better than that by low proficiency counterparts; relatively high proficiency English learners can employ multiple strategies to express their apology, and use more complicated and more diverse constructions of discourse while low proficiency English ones are likely to use simple, routinized expressions and sometimes with grammar mistakes, so learners' L2 linguistic proficiency has an effect on their speech act performances. This study also supports Ellis' view that adequate second language proficiency is indispensable to pragmatic transfer, and presents some evidence of Beebe's view that higher proficiency second language learners have more negative L1 pragmatic transfer.Finally, this thesis suggests a new pattern for pragmatic competence in classroom instructions.