Chinese EFL Learners' Pragmatic Knowledge And Processing Of Conventional Expressions In English

Conventional expressions refer to formulaic sequences that are frequently used in certain social situations to accomplish recurrent communication needs.They are an important pragmatic resource for the realization of speech acts.For instance,How are you doing is a conventional expression that performs the speech act of greeting in the context of meeting friends,and Sorry to keep you waiting performs the speech act of apology in the context of being late.Second language(L2)learners' knowledge of conventional expressions has drawn wide attention in the field of L2 pragmatics.Research done from this perspective usually utilizes offline multiple-choice tests and discourse completion tests to investigate L2 learners' recognition and production of such sequences.Few studies have tried to use any online task to probe into the representation and processing of conventional expressions in the brain of L2 learners.Taking both pragmatic and psycholinguistic issues into account,the present study investigated Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic knowledge and processing of English conventional expressions in an online contextualized naturalness judgment task,which yielded two types of data:naturalness judgments and reaction times.One hundred non-English-major sophomores from a Chinese university participated in the study,who were divided into three proficiency groups according to their College English Test-6 scores.Results of data analysis showed that participants of all three proficiency groups accepted significantly more conventional expressions than matched unconventional ones,indicating that they could make a distinction between conventional and unconventional expressions in the recurrent social contexts.Moreover,all participants reacted to conventional expressions significantly faster than to unconventional ones,though no significant reaction time difference was found for the target words.These results suggested that participants processed conventional expressions more efficiently than unconventional ones,though they were not familiar with the close association between conventional expressions and certain contexts,which might have been caused by the holistic storage of conventional expressions and the associative mechanism between these strings and the contexts in the brain.No significant inter-group difference was found in either the judgment or the reaction time data,which might be attributed to the fact that English teaching in China tends to emphasize on grammar and vocabulary and neglect the importance of practical language use.The present study to some extent reveals Chinese EFL learners'inadequacy of pragmatic ability,and more importantly,it provides support for the holistic hypothesis and proposes a testable explanation for the storage of contexts as well as their association with conventional expressions in the brain.