A Study of Relationships between L1 Pragmatic Transfer and L2 Proficiency

Jiemin Bu

doi:10.5539/elt.v5n1p32

Abstract

Studies in interlanguage pragmatics have shown that L2 learners’ proficiency has an influence on the occurrences of L1 pragmatic transfer. However, questions remain whether the relationship between L1 pragmatic transfer and L2 proficiency is positive or negative. This paper is designed to study L1 pragmatic transfer in requests made by Chinese learners of English at low L2 proficiency level and at high L2 proficiency level and how L1 pragmatic transfer is related to their L2 proficiency. Ten low proficiency learners of English, ten high proficiency learners of English?ten native speakers of English and ten native speakers of Chinese participate in this study. Requests are collected by means of a discourse completion test questionnaire and are analysed in terms of requestive semantic formulas based on the taxonomy of request strategies, internal modifiers and external modifiers. The research results reveal that L1 pragmatic transfer decreases with the increase of L2 proficiency such as learners’ use of direct strategies, lexical and phrasal downgraders, imperatives and grounder and no clear relationship is found between L1 pragmatic transfer and L2 proficiency in terms of the other request strategies, internal modifiers and external modifiers. These results provide partial support to negative correlation hypothesis —high proficiency L2 learners are less likely to transfer their native language pragmatic norms since they have enough control over L2.

Highlights

Pragmatic transfer is a research branch of interlanguage pragmatics, which can be understood as the influence exerted by learners’ pragmatic knowledge of languages and cultures other than second language on their comprehension, production and learning of second language pragmatic information (Kasper, 1992: 207)
This present study aims to answer the following three questions: (1) Is there L1 pragmatic transfer in frequency and content of semantic formulas used in request strategies by Chinese EFL learners at different L2 proficiency levels?
This paper has studied how L1 pragmatic transfer works on the requestive behaviour of learners at different L2 proficiency levels

Summary

Introduction

Pragmatic transfer is a research branch of interlanguage pragmatics, which can be understood as the influence exerted by learners’ pragmatic knowledge of languages and cultures other than second language on their comprehension, production and learning of second language pragmatic information (Kasper, 1992: 207). Many studies show that learners may have learned the target language grammar and the target language form, they are not necessarily able to understand the social and cultural rules which constrain the target language use. In their communication with native speakers of the target language, learners tend to transfer their native social and cultural norms into the target language, produce inappropriate linguistic behaviours, and lead to pragmatic failure. This phenomenon is referred to as L1 pragmatic transfer. This paper intends to study the relationship between L1 pragmatic transfer and L2 proficiency by investigating request strategies used by high and low proficiency levels of Chinese learners of English

Methods

Results

Conclusion