A Study Of Chinese English Majors' Speech Act Of Apology

With the great development of modern society, the role of English is becoming more and more important. In China, the knowledge accumulation of language has been emphasized in English teaching, but the students'pragmatic competence has been ignored, which leads to fail communication in English. All these factors will influence, even hinder the development of students' pragmatic competence.Pragmatic competence, as a kind of communicative ability, is one of the most important elements for successful communication. To cultivate students' pragmatic competence is to develop students'ability to communicate with others in proper and efficient way. Speech acts always is a mean to study the communicative ability. This thesis will focus on the apology speech acts, which is widely used in our daily life.This thesis mainly aims at the apology acts produced by Chinese English majors in university. All subjects come from both China and America. There are 53 English major juniors in the Department of Foreign Language Studies of Xi'an Technological University, and 15 American students of Jackson State University in the U.S. The 53 Chinese English majors are divided into 2 groups according to whether they have passed the Test for English Majors-Band 4 (TEM-4) as standard. Research data are from the questionnaires answered by all subjects from the 3 groups.Through the data analysis, the author found that there were both similarities and differences in choosing apology strategies between Chinese English majors and Native American English speakers. Similarity mainly lies in the extensive use of "IFID" and "taking on responsibility" by all subjects. The difference takes place on other apology strategies. Subjects tend to use other different strategies in different situations. The two groups of Chinese English majors prefer the similar apology strategy, which indicates that there is no close relation between the language proficiency level and pragmatic competence. The correlation between the choice of apology strategy and social distance, social status, severity of offence and the obligation of apology is limited.Finally, this thesis analyzes some pragmatic failures produced by Chinese English majors when they performing the speech act of apology, and then proposes some suggestions for English teaching.