Pragmatic Failures In Refusal Speech Act By Chinese EFL Learners

Nowadays,the concept of “pragmatic competence” has been paid great attention to both in language teaching and language learning.Although second language learners make efforts to improve their pragmatic competence,they still do not know how to react in line with the target cultural norms.In other words,the pragmatic competence of Chinese learners of English is relatively weak.The present thesis aims to explore pragmatic failures committed by Chinese learners of English based on the speech act theory.It mainly focuses on three questions:(1)Are there any similarities and differences between native English speakers and Chinese EFL learners in the selection of refusal strategies?(2)What kind of pragmatic failures do the Chinese college EFL learners commit in making a refusal? And what are the causes that lead to the pragmatic failures in the speech act of refusal?(3)Does the foreign language proficiency influence pragmatic failures committed by Chinese EFL learners?The study includes three groups of subjects.Both the first group and the second group consist of 35 Chinese learners of English who are from the same college in Shandong Province.While the first group's English proficiency is at advanced level,the second group is at low level.The third group consists of 20 English speakers from Australia.The instrument of this study is DCT(Discourse Completion Test)which consists of 9 situations: three requests,two invitations,two offers and two suggestions.The social status and social distance will be taken into consideration.The findings indicate that both Chinese subjects and English native speakers wouldlike to choose the indirect strategies and they often combine many refusal strategies to minimize the face threat of refusal act.Relatively,Chinese subjects behave more directly than English native speakers.The findings show that Chinese learners of English commit4 types of pragmatic failures,which include wrong use of the target language expressions or just transferring the expressions from L1(first language),unsuccessful refusal,violating the target language conventions and violating the target cultural conventions.The cultural differences and negative transfer are considered as the main causes of pragmatic failures.The findings also show that Chinese learners of English both at high and low levels commit almost similar pragmatic failures in terms of frequency and types,which suggests that L2(second language)proficiency plays an insignificant role in influencing pragmatic failures.