Pragmatic Transfer In Chinese EFL Learners' Requests And Apologies

This study sets out to investigate pragmatic transfer in Chinese EFL learners' requests and apologies in light of the Compensation Hypothesis (Wang, 2003) . Specifically, the research focus is on to what extent pragmatic transfer exists and how pragmatic transfer comes about. For this purpose, a qualitative study was conducted with participants from a sample of four third-year English majors and five postgraduates majoring in linguistics and applied linguistics from Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. Altogether ten situations (five requests and five apologies) were selected from the 24 discourse completion tests (DCT) developed by Liu (2004) . Then the verbal discourse completion tests (VDCT) and the multiple-choice discourse completion tests (MDCT) were administered to the participants followed by an interview. For each situation, the participants listened to the researcher who read the situation aloud and responded orally to the situation. Immediately afterwards, the participants took the MDCT, accompanied by think-aloud. Then a follow-up interview was conducted. Finally a general interview was conducted to elicit the participants' background information.Results show that pragmatic transfer exits in the frequency of semantic formulas in both requests and apologies. The frequency of semantic formulas manifests itself in two areas: verbosity and overuse (in the case of apologies, also underuse of some semantic formulas). For requests, these two findings have been supported by both VDCT and MDCT data, whereas for apologies, the participants' being verbose in the VDCT data is not confirmed in the MDCT data because the options in the MDCT do not allow such support, but the verbosity finds support in the think-aloud and interview data. Analysis of think-aloud and interview data reveals that pragmatic transfer in the participants' requests and apologies occurred partly due to the participants' perception of politeness value and the three situational variables(i.e., status, distance, imposition/severity). The perception, which is part of the learners' internal context, may result in either pragmalinguistic or sociopragmatic transfer.The present study suggests that transfer is not merely transfer of linguistic elements, but more importantly, transfer of contextual knowledge, thus supporting Wang's (2003) Compensation Hypothesis, which approaches language transfer from a contextual perspective. Thus, the present study offers implication for English teaching and learning in that learners should be provided with rich and contextually appropriate input so that relevant L2 contextual knowledge in their internal context might be more likely to be activated when the learners are using the language forms.