A Study of the Effects of Language Transfer on Refusal Strategies for Second Language Acquisition among Chinese English Major Students

Abstract

Many EFL learners have strong linguistic competence, but lack sufficient pragmatic competence, including the use of politeness strategies. The study aims to explore the effects of language transfer on refusal strategies for Chinese L2 learners with higher English proficiency. To test the common claim that refusal strategies transfer strongly from L1 to L2 and are highly influenced by sociocultural factors, online questionnaires were conducted among 22 female students majoring in English at Shenzhen University. The results indicated a limited effect of L1 on L2 for subjects with high English proficiency and showed that the transfer of refusal strategies may be influenced by the memory connections between knowledge input and transferring subjects in L2 learning, in addition to the sociocultural factors. The result suggests teachers create a more authentic communication environment to encourage students to innovatively create a variety of expressions and strategies based on what they have learned and according to different scenarios.