Pragmatic Transfer In English Learners' Speech Act Realization And The Effect Of Explicit Pragmatic Instruction: An Empirical Study

The study of the learner language has been a growing source of concern in pragmatics in recent years. The pragmatic perspective toward the learner language led to the birth of a new interdiscipline—interlanguage pragmatics, of which pragmatic transfer is an essential component. Beginning with an extensive review over interlanguage pragmatics study and especially pragmatic transfer studies both at home and abroad, the thesis points out that negative pragmatic transfer has drawn too much attention, while its counterpart, positive pragmatic transfer, which facilitates successful communication is often neglected, and also, the influence of instruction in classroom setting on pragmatic transfer hasn't yet been decided. Therefore, an empirical study is conducted among two groups of English majors: Grade 1 and Grade 4 in AHNU.This empirical study investigates pragmatic transfer and the effect of instruction on the role of pragmatic transfer in English majors'performance in the realization of four types of speech acts: greetings, partings, refusals and apologies. Its goal is to expand the range of learning targets addressed in pragmatic interventional studies. Two kinds of questionnaires are designed to collect data of pragmatic transfer in English majors'performance: one is the multiple choice questionnaire, and the other is the written task—Discourse Completion Task. By these two means, both oral and written production messages are collected, thus a comprehensive analysis is possible. Therefore, the analysis is carried out in two approaches: quantitative and qualitative. A detailed description of the results is provided, which is further supported by a qualitative analysis. The findings of the empirical study demonstrate that pragmatic transfer is evident in Chinese EFL...