A Study On Pragmatic Transfer In English Language Learning-Based On The Speech Act Of Requests

The thesis is based on the theories of second language acquisition and interlanguage pragmatics. The purpose of the present study is to investigate pragmatic transfer by Chinese EFL learners in the speech act of requests, and examine to what extent pragmatic transfer is affected by the learners' level of L2 proficiency. For this study, 80 Chinese EFL learners were tested as subjects to respond in English to 9 different situations in which they perform the speech act of requests. Data for this investigation were collected through a written questionnaire in the form of the "Discourse Completion Task". It discovers that negative pragmalinguistic transfer is closely associated with L2 proficiency although the subjects both in the higher proficiency group and in the lower proficiency group didn't show much evidence of variation concerning negative sociopragmatic transfer. The analyses of the subjects' requests on sequence and strategy further display that negative pragmatic transfer is caused by native language forms and culture. It is suggested that language teaching should lay more emphasis on raising learners' cultural awareness.