An Exploratory Study On Chinese English Learners' Pragmatic Transfer At The Pereptual Level

The role that learners' L1 pragmatic knowledge plays in their acquisition and useof L2 pragmatic knowledge has always been a major concern in interlanguagepragmatic studies. Most of the studies previously conducted to address this issue werebased on learners' production. However, pragmatic transfer occurring at theproductive level might not necessarily be indicative of transfer of pragmaticknowledge at the perceptual level. Lack of evidence for pragmatic transfer at theproductive level does not always imply that transfer of pragmatic knowledge is notpresent at the perceptual level. Thus, the present study made a tentative attempt tostudy pragmatic transfer at the perceptual level.To find out whether pragmatic transfer occurs at the perceptual level and if yes,whether general L2 proficiency level influences its occurrence, we investigated agroup of American subjects' pragmatic perceptions as to the appropriateness of certainspeech act strategies in English, two groups of Chinese subjects' perceptions as to theappropriateness of these strategies in English, and the same Chinese subjects'perceptions as to the appropriateness of these strategies in Chinese. One group ofChinese subjects consisted of senior high school learners of English, representingEnglish learners with comparatively lower general English proficiency. The othergroup of Chinese subjects consisted of university learners of English, representingEnglish learners with a comparatively higher level of general English proficiency.By comparing the American subjects' perceptions with the Chinese learners'perceptions in L1 and L2 contexts, we discovered that pragmatic transfer did occur atthe perceptual level, but it was not very frequent in occurrence. The tact that bothpositive pragmatic transfer and negative pragmatic transfer were present showed thatthe subjects' utilization of L1 pragmatic knowledge was involuntary and non-selective.The subjects were unable to make the best out of what they had already known.Besides, despite the fact that the two groups of subjects were different in terms of general English proficiency, the instances of pragmatic transfer detected in their datawere similar in terms of number and distribution, which indicated that general Englishproficiency did not have much influence on pragmatic transfer. Based on suchfindings, it is strongly recommended that pedagogical intervention be introduced toguide the subjects to make use of the rich pragmatic knowledge base (L1 pragmaticknowledge) they have brought to the task of L2 pragmatic acquisition, and to avoidits possible intervention.