Chinese Efl Learners Pragmatic Competence In Requests

Requests, a speech act people frequently use to perform everyday social interactions, have attracted particular attenTION IN Politeness theories, pragmatics, and second language acquisition. This book looks at request behaviours in a significant EFL population - Chinese speaking learners of English. It will draw on recent literature, such as politeness theories and cognitive models for interlanguage pragmatics development, as well as placing special emphasis on situational context and formulaic language to provide a more fine-grained investigation. A rnage of request scenarios has been specifically designed for this project, from common service encounters to highly face-threatening situations such as borrowing money and asking a favour of police officer. Our findings on Chinese-style pragmatic behaviours and patterns of pragmatic development will be of value to cross-cultural pragmatics researchers, TESOL professionals, and university students with an interest in this area of study.

Email has become a ubiquitous medium of communication. It is used amongst people from the same speech community, but also between people from different language and cultural backgrounds. When people communicate, they tend to follow rules of speaking in their native language, termed by scholars as pragmatic transfer, which may cause misunderstandings and lead to cross-cultural communication breakdown. This book examines pragmatic transfer by Chinese learners of English at different proficiency levels when writing email requests and refusals. To meet the need for developmental research in L2 pragmatics, it also explores whether pragmatic transfer increases or decreases as language proficiency improves. This book will appeal to researchers and students in interlanguage and intercultural pragmatics, second language acquisition, English as a second/foreign language, and intercultural communication.

The purpose of this study is to explore the nature, patterns, conditions and constraints of Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic and discourse transfer in the situated discourse of requests by comparing the different pragmatic and discursive choices between the Chinese EFL learners and the English native speakers. The study found that EFL learners' transfer of pragmalinguistic and discourse strategies interacted with their sociopragmatic perceptions of the contextual variables in social interaction to varying degrees. The study, incorporating perspectives on linguistic patterns, cognitive processes and social influences, proposes a model on the dynamic and fluid interaction among structural factors and non-structural factors. A matrix of five possible transfer patterns is proposed to account for the observed variety of idiosyncrasies in the learner transfer. Efforts on explicit pragmatics instruction and systematic pragmatics strategy training in EFL classrooms are called for while respect for learners' subjective choice for whose pragmatic forms to use in different interactional contexts is also advocated.

中介语语用能力对英语学习者口语交际具有至关重要的作用。《Interlanguage Pragmatic Competence of EFL Learne》以贵州省四所本科院校的英语专业大学生为研究对象，采用立意抽样和随机抽样相结合的抽样方法，基于英语中介语语用能力测试和半结构化访谈收集数据。在此基础上，采用描述性统计数据描述学生的英语中介语语用能力，采用单因素方差分析和Post-hoc Scheffe测试分析方法探讨汉族学生和少数民族学生、不同性别学生及不同英语水平学生的英语中介语语用能力差异；并分析了差异产生的原因。以期充实中介语语用能力测试研究文献，并为促进中国英语学习者中介语语用能力提高尽到绵薄之力。

This book adopts a cross-sectional approach and mainly focuses on one of the core pragmatic constructs, formulaic/pragmatic routines, in addition to components put forward by Roever (2011) and Taguchi (2013). It actively integrates multidimensional pragmatic modalities—including both production (initiating and responding) and reception (recognition, comprehension, and perception), together with learners’ cognitive processes—rather than one or two types of task modalities. Focusing more on the Chinese EFL context instead of Japanese or European L1 learners, it also takes advantage of an emerging instrument, the computer-animated elicitation task, for data collection based on authentic oral responses and to avoid “coached” responses. The socio-cognitive approach, proposed by the famous linguistic expert Prof. Istvan Kecskes, is subsequently applied to conduct an in-depth analysis of the data. Hence, the book introduces a new and fruitful theoretical perspective to the traditional L2 pragmatic research field.

This study is a longitudinal investigation in the effectiveness of interactive exposure on the acquisition of English requests in a study-abroad setting. Nineteen Chinese teachers, who taught English as a foreign language in China, attended a short-term teacher-training program in Canada and had access to opportunities for authentic interaction with native English speakers. Another 19 Chinese EFL teachers who had never been to an English speaking country served as the comparison group. Twenty English native speakers were also recruited to provide native norms for the pragmatics assessment measures. Three research questions were addressed in this study. First, I examined what kind of interactive exposure was accessible to the study abroad teachers, and investigated what types of interactive activities might contribute to pragmatics learning. Second, I examined whether study-abroad teachers demonstrated approximation to native speaker norms with regard to requesting through two tests: a written discourse completion task (WDCT) and an appropriateness judgment task (AJT). Finally, I explored whether the study-abroad experience had increased teachers' confidence in teaching English pragmatics. The data analysis of the study-abroad teachers' logs showed that they were engaged in a much wider variety of English interactive activities than the at-home teachers. They also demonstrated a more significant growth in pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic awareness in certain situations, but failed to acquire a full range of the native-like forms. Compared with native English speakers, the Chinese teachers used similar external modifiers, but less variety in request formulae and internal modification. They did not appear to realize that some strategies and formulae are context-based and scenario-specific. However, their confidence in teaching pragmatics was enhanced. The findings show that social interaction, cultural values, pragmatic transfer, social role, and living arrangement are factors affecting L2 pragmatic acquisition in a study-abroad context. The results also reveal that it is difficult for adult L2 learners to develop native-like pragmatic competence in a naturalistic setting, due to a lack of sufficient target language exposure, corrective feedback, and explicit pragmatic instruction.