A Survey Of Chinese EFL Learners' Pragmatic Competence In Apology-making Speech Act

Pragmatic competence, as a concept, has been widely recognized in language teaching in recent years. And acquiring pragmatic competence is one of the important goals of language teaching and learning. In the process of English teaching, teachers should train the students to use language in communicatively effective and appropriate ways. That is to say, teachers should help students to obtain the pragmatic competence. So the thesis is to investigate the pragmatic competence of Chinese English Foreign Language learners in apology-making speech act. Apology is chosen mainly because it is widely used in our daily life.This paper endeavors to make a study of speech act of apology to describe the selection of apology strategies by Chinese EFL learners, exactly speaking, college English majors and non-English majors, and analyze their pragmatic competence, as compared with that of native American speakers.The data for this study is elicited from three groups of subjects through two questionnaires, one is open-ended discourse completion test (DCT) questionnaire with eight apology situations in it and the other questionnaire of evaluating social distance, social power, severity of offence and obligation of apology in the apology situations. The findings indicate that there are some similarities and differences among the three groups in the selection of apology strategies. The similarities shows that the strategy of illocutionary force indicating device (IFID) and the strategy of taking on responsibility are in the most frequent use. And the strategy of promising forbearance is least frequently chosen. The differences lie in that most Chinese EFL learners perform no speech act of apology in some situations and adopt more strategies or fewer strategies than native speakers. There is no obvious difference between Chinese EFL learners at two different linguistic levels, which suggest that language proficiency may not determine the development of EFL learners' pragmatic competence. In terms of evaluation of apology situations, there existing limited differences between Chinese EFL learners and native American speakers. The study also shows that some of the factors correlate with some strategies. The result also shows that there exists pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic failures in their pragmatic behaviors.On the basis of analyzing pragmatic transfer and cultural difference, which might constrain the development of Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic competence, the study finally discusses some implications for EFL teaching.