An Investigation Into Chinese EFL Learners' Speech Act Of Apology

English, as a common language of the world, is crucial in the communication. So English teaching has always been paid more attention to in China. However, there are still some problems in our country's English teaching, such as time-consuming and inefficacious, and much emphasis on the accumulation of linguistic knowledge, neglecting to cultivate the communicative competence of the Chinese learners of English, who are learning English as a foreign language (EFL). These existing problems inevitably hinder the development of Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic competence. As a result, the learners' pragmatic competence development, which falls far behind, is imbalanced with their linguistic knowledge. Thus, in communication, interlocutors sometimes can not choose the right linguistic forms to function properly in certain contexts, and sometimes they may not understand what is meant by what is said. Then, communication breakdowns may appear.Thomas (1983) regards these kinds of communication breakdowns as pragmatic failures, which are different from grammar errors. Grammatical errors may be irritating and impede communication, but at least, as a rule, they are apparent in the surface structure, so that H is aware that an error has occurred. Once alerted to the fact that S is not fully grammatically competent, native speakers seem to have little difficulty in making allowances for it, pragmatic failure, on the other hand, is rarely recognized as such by non-linguists. If a non-native speaker appears to speak fluently (i.e., is grammatically competent), a native speaker is likely to attribute his/her apparent impoliteness of unfriendliness, not to any linguistic deficiency, but to boorishness or ill-will. While grammatical error may reveal a speaker to be a less than proficient language-user, pragmatic failure reflects badly on him/her as a person (Thomas, 1983: 96).Therefore, English teaching should pay more attention to the cultivation of learners' pragmatic competence to avoid grammatical error and pragmatic failure to some extent in the future.The study of Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic competence belongs to the research area of interlanguage pragmatics, which originated and developed rapidly overseas aiming at the comparison of western languages. Interlanguage pragmatic study at home was relatively late and there were not enough studies about Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic competence.Since the status quo of English teaching does not seem favorable for the simultaneous development of both EFL learners' linguistic knowledge and pragmatic competence, and there were not enough findings to facilitate English teaching to a large extent, something has to be done to help cultivate learners' pragmatic competence. Speech acts, taken as minimal units for communication by Searle (1979), are frequently used in daily communication. An exploration of how Chinese EFL learners realize their speech acts might reveal their interlanguage pragmatic competence to some extent. The present study takes the speech act of apology as a research focus by means of questionnaire to investigate the possible differences existing in apology strategy selection and in perception of factors affecting the apology strategy selection between English learners of high proficiency level (English majors) and English learners of low proficiency level (non-English majors). The investigation is to test two hypotheses:Hypothesis 1: English learners of high proficiency level outperform the learners of low proficiency level in pragmalinguitic perspective.Hypothesis 2: English learners of high proficiency level outperform the learners of low proficiency level in sociopragmatic perspective.The data collected is analyzed with SPSS 12.0. After the examination of the apology strategy distribution, the comparison the total number of apology strategies used and the T-test of the strategies employed by both groups of participants in all offense situations, hypothesis 1 is confirmed, for the number of strategies used by English majors exceeds that of non-English majors in most strategy selection and there are statistically significant differences in most strategies used.In order to test hypothesis 2, investigations are done from the perspective of both groups of participants' perception of factors affecting the apology strategy selection. In the perception of the correlation of the four factors, both groups of participants show surprisingly congruence, they all perceived statistically correlation between the two contextual factors, namely, severity of offense and obligation to apologize but no correlation perceived between the two social factors, namely, social distance and social status. Besides, they all perceived a statistically significant correlation between one contextual factor (severity of offense) and one social factor (social status). In investigating Mean rating and Standard deviation of each factor perception, the two groups of participants also show similar tendencies. The similar perception findings leas use to the conclusion that both groups of participants have more or less the same degree of sociopragmatic competence, thus, hypothesis 2 is not confirmed.Exploration of and suggestions for the cultivation of English learners' pragmatic competence are offered based on the findings from two aspects, namely, contextual factors and cultural differences. In classroom teaching, in order to improve Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic competence, teachers should try their best to direct students' attention to contextual factors and cultural differences.