Research On Pragmatic Reverse Transfer In Request Speech Act Of Chinese Learners In Australia

Language transfer plays a significant role in second language acquisition.In recent years,reverse transfer,which is the language transfer from target language to mother tongue,has gradually attracted researchers' attention at home and abroad.However,the researches are mainly literature review or descriptive analysis,and the objects of the study are often those whose mother tongue is Chinese and target language English.There are rare research focusing on reverse transfer and being conducted with the objects whose mother tongue is English and target language Chinese,which is of great significance to teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages and intercultural communication.The thesis is conducted.to verifying the reverse transfer and intermediary cultural style hypothesis of Australian Chinese learners by analyzing their request speech acts.The objects of this study are monolingual Australian whose mother tongue are English and Chinese learners of different level from Confucius Institute at the University of Newcastle.By utilizing discourse completion test to collect data and SPSS 23.0 to conduct descriptive statistics and contrastive analysis,the thesis aims to answer the following questions:How do monolingual Australians make request?Is there any reverse transfer showed on Chinese learners of lower level?Is there any reverse transfer or intermediary cultural style showed on Chinese learners of higher level?What is the difference of request speech act behavior between Chinese learners of lower level and higher level?The thesis reveals that monolingual Australians tend to clarify their request at the same time show politeness,which is corresponded with the low-context language feature of English.What's more,the behaviors of Chinese learners of low level and high level both reflect the reverse transfer,and the Chinese learners of high level have also form intermediary cultural style on several aspects of request speech act.Meanwhile,the thesis exposes that proficiency degree of Chinese are not positively correlated with the forming of reverse transfer.The finding,to some extent,confirms the reverse transfer and intermediary cultural style among Australian Chinese learners on request speech act and gives suggestion on teaching Chinese to speakers of other languages and intercultural communication.