A Pragmatic Study Of Chinese EFL Learners' Speech Act Of Apology

The study of speech acts in interlanguage has been one of the hot issues in interlanguage pragmatics studies, and it can serve as the basic tool of exploring the EFL learners'pragmatic competence. This thesis conducts a pragmatic study of the speech act of apology from the interlanguage and cross-cultural perspectives.This thesis aims to investigate how Chinese EFL learners, specifically, the English-major students perform the speech act of apology so as to explore the development of their pragmatic competence. The subjects in this study are of three kinds. The data for this study are elicited from an open-ended discourse completion test (DCT) questionnaire which includes ten situations and the social factors assessment questionnaire which evaluates social distance, social power and severity of offence in the situations. Analysis of frequencies of apology strategy choice is conducted to identify the differences and similarities in the choice of apology strategies among three groups. Spearman correlation tests are conducted to explore whether the choice of apology strategies correlates with the evaluation of the apology situations. Meanwhile, this study also employs a qualitative method to study the contents of the subjects'written responses. The main results indicate that: there are similarities and differences in the choice of apology strategies. On the one hand, Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers share similar range of apology strategies and prefer to use the strategies of IFID and acknowledgement of responsibility which are the two most frequently used strategies. On the other hand, they bear some differences in the choice of IFID, acknowledgement of responsibility, offer of repair, explanation, and intensification in some situations where social power between the speaker and the hearer is not equal. The Chinese EFL learners at two different linguistic proficiency levels do not demonstrate significant differences from each other in terms of apology performance. In other words, their performance of apology appears similar in many cases, which suggests that high levels of linguistic proficiency cannot ensure equally high levels of pragmatic competence. The Spearman correlation tests yield limited significant correlations between the sociopramatic factors and the choice of the apology strategies. And it is noticeable that, compared with native English speakers, there are more correlations between the choice of apology strategies and the sociopragmatic factors for Chinese EFL learners.Furthermore, this study discusses some pragmatic failures, and analyzes two factors, different cultural values and linguistic proficiency which may affect the development of Chinese EFL learners'pragmatic competence. Finally this study presents several implications for EFL teaching in China.