Pragmatic Transfer In Apologies Made By Chinese Learners Of English

The present study is about the pragmatic transfer in apologies made by Chinese learners of English. It aims to examine whether the apology strategies that Chinese English learners have acquired in Chinese make an effect on their performance of speech act of apology in English. The research questions of this thesis can be summarized as:(1) Does pragmatic transfer happen when Chinese learners of English make an apology in English?(2) Does the pragmatic transfer correlate with the English proficiency?Based on Jiang Jingyang and Hu Rong’s improvement for Meier’s “Repair Work”, this study summarized seven apology strategies according to the characteristics of Chinese apologies. The seven apology strategies are:(1) preventive apology,(2) advanced apology,(3) groundless apology,(4) avoiding apology,(5) reverse apology,(6) expressing thanks by apologizing,(7) apologize for sneezing. Among these apology strategies, the first two are the similarities of apologies between Chinese and English and the rest five belong to Chinese unique apology strategies. The study adopted a comparison-based method to identify pragmatic transfer. It provided the following three evidences: intragroup homogeneity, crosslanguage congruity, and intralingual contrast. These three evidences correlate to each other and work together to prove the existence of the pragmatic transfer. The participants for this study are 74 Chinese English learners from Hebei University of Science and Technology. They were divided into two groups: the intermediate learners and the advanced learners. The research tool is the questionnaire designed based on the above seven apology strategies and the other tool is interview. The questionnaire has English version and Chinese version. The data were collected two times in order to avoid the mutual influence of the two versions.This study found that the apologies in Chinese acquired by Chinese English learners indeed made an effect on their performance of speech act of apology in English. Therefore, the pragmatic transfer does occur in the apologies made by Chinese English learners. Additionally, there is no significant difference between the two groups. Nevertheless, the advanced learners got a higher accuracy than the intermediate learners in the two congruent cases, and they performed better than the intermediate learners in the use of reverse apology, avoiding apology and apology for sneezing in the non-congruent cases. The findings of this paper have some implications on English teaching. The pragmatic transfer in apologies is a result of differences between Chinese and English. So teachersshould make an endeavor on culture learning and lead students to make comparisons between Chinese culture and English culture in the teaching process. In this way, learners’ pragmatic awareness will be strengthened and their abilities in cross-cultural communication can also be improved efficiently.