Investigating Chinese EFL Learners' Acquisition Of Gratitude Speech Act

Interlanguage pragmatics is taken for granted as the second generation hybrid between pragmatics and second language acquisition, which has gained the research favor from linguists ever since it comes into being. As its root in theory is originated from speech act, politeness theory and the like in pragmatics, linguists, therefore, tend to study nonnative speakers'pragmatic competence by means of speech acts.Consequently, the present study selects 109 Chinese EFL learners'and 30 English native speakers as the informants, investigates the informants'acquisition of English gratitude speech act (GSA), and analyzes the data from head acts, internal modification and external modification, the three aspects in GSA. The study aims to reveal the difference in gratitude speech act between learners and native speakers, and the difference among different learner levels. Reasons for these differences are also elaborated in the present study. Through the questionnaires, statistics and comparison, the study concludes the following findings:1. Learners are significantly different from native speakers in all the three aspects. For head act, learners are more likely to use unmarked phrase than NSs; but for unmarked verb and marked verb, native speakers tend to adopt them more often than learners; in terms of internal modification, learners use complementary phrase in a higher frequency than native speakers, whereas native speakers show their superiority to learners in the use of coreferent addressers; with respect to external strategies, learners use the strategies like "honor", "identification" and the like in a fairly higher frequency than native speakers.2. As for three different learner levels, they are not significantly different in the overall performance of gratitude speech act, which, therefore, indicates learners' pragmatic competence in GSA does not develop in a regular and systematic pattern.3. Cross-cultural differences, language transfer, input deficiency and failure, classroom setting restriction, and inappropriate pedagogy may all account for the expressive differences between learners and native speakers. At the end of the thesis lies the implication on how to effectively improve the pragmatic competence, which includes the cultivation of acculturation concept, the improvement of textbook design and instructors'presentation, and the implementation of such teaching methods like project-based instruction, etc.