A Study On Pragmatic Failures In Apology-making Speech Act By Chinese College Students

Pragmatic competence, as a concept, has been widely recognized in language teaching inrecent years. And acquiring pragmatic competence is one of the important goals of languageteaching and learning. This thesis is to investigate the pragmatic failures in apology-makingspeech act committed by Chinese college EFL students. Apology is chosen mainly because itis widely used in our daily life.The present study is conducted with three groups of subjects: the first group consists offorty Chinese college students of first-year and the second group forty students of third-year.All the Chinese students are EFL (English as Foreign Language) students from ShandongYouth University. And the third group consists of twenty native English speakers fromoutsourcing division of CVIC SE (a software company) and their answers will be taken as thestandard to compare with those of the Chinese subjects. The data for this study is elicitedthrough an open-ended“Discourse Completion Test”(DCT) with eight apology situations,which is an effective instrument to examine the pragmatic failures.The analysis of the data begins with the overall classification of the Chinese EFLstudents’apology strategy, and then a comprehensive picture is obtained after descriptiveanalysis of the features of each group, finally, based on the standard answers of the Englishnative speakers, comparison between first-year and third-year EFL subjects’data will be madeto discuss the relationship between language proficiency and pragmatic competence. Thethesis focuses on the study of Chinese subjects’apology strategies for which quantitativeanalysis is combined with proper qualitative analysis to identify the pragmatic failures duringthe process of analysis.The findings indicate that as far as apology strategies are concerned, pragmatic failuresare found in almost every strategy and the highest occurrence of pragmatic failures is theexpressions related to the“IFID”strategy and the pragmatic failures committed by the twoChinese groups are of similar percentage which suggests that higher language proficiency canhelp the development of pragmatic competence to a certain extent, but it is not adequate topromise to commit no pragmatic failure in a cross-cultural communication.The discussion of the findings indicates that the causes accounting for the pragmaticfailures are complicated. First, cultural differences are chief reasons for the pragmatic failures.Second, negative pragmatic transfer is the direct factor resulting in the pragmatic failures incross-cultural communication—the Chinese subjects are apt to transfer the strategies andexpressions of their mother tongue into the target language. Third, inappropriate language input is found to be responsible for pragmatic failures in cross-cultural communication.Analysis of the behaviors of apology of Chinese college EFL students can givepedagogical implication for our college English teaching aiming at promoting communicativecompetence, such as teachers need to use the materials as authentic as possible to arousestudents’cultural awareness in the process of language teaching and introduce pragmaticknowledge about target language when teaching linguistic knowledge. What’s more, thetraining of teachers should be emphasized. If students can interact with such kind of inputunder the proper guidance of teachers, they may become more sensitive in interpretingdifferent speech acts.