A Study Of Interlanguage Pragmatic Failures In Accepting And Refusing By Chinese EFL Students

This paper presents a study of interlanguage pragmatic failures made by Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students when accepting and refusing other's requests and offers. It is conducted by using the quantitative research method combined with the questionnaire for data collecting method. After data analysis, the author started to find out the reasons for pragmatic failures made by Chinese EFL students when they accept and refuse other's requests and offers.The questionnaire is designed according to a Home Teaching system. Some questions and situations are chosen and modified. This questionnaire is conducted with 65 subjects who are none-English major first grade students of Northeast Normal University. Considering the validity and reliability, 59 questionnaires are chosen as the data base for this study.After analyzing the results of each questionnaire, the discussions on the reasons of pragmatic failures are given. The analysis of findings shows that there are two main types of pragmatic failures:pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. The reasons for the pragmalinguistic failure are pragmatic negative transfer--second language learners tend to transfer the communication strategies and expressions from mother tongue to target language; and teaching-induced error which means during normal English classroom teaching some pragmatic failures are made by teachers or textbooks compilers so that students will take the pragmatic failures for granted because they are taught to say that. The reasons for sociopragmatic failure are more complicated than that of pragmalinguistic failure. There are mainly four reasons:the lack of target language knowledge; the lack of pragmatic knowledge; the neglecting of social distance and cultural difference.The analysis of the pragmatic failures by Chinese EFL students in accepting and refusing other's requests and offers can give some practical pedagogical implications to English classroom teaching. One way is to verify the teaching materials instead of focusing on the textbooks, such as adding movies, scripts or newspapers into English teaching. Another way is to introduce pragmatic knowledge to students in order to make them able to identify the pragmatic failures and try to avoid such failures.