A Cross-Sectional Study Of Chinese English Learners' Realization Strategies Of Apologies

Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) research has been one of the focuses in second language acquisition (SLA) studies since the 1980s. Many researchers have investigated the foreign language learners' pragmatic competence, but most studies have been essentially comparative rather than acquisitional. That is, most previous research has concentrated on comparing "what learners or nonnative speakers do to what native speakers do" (Bardovi-Harlig, 1999: 678) in the comprehension and production of speech acts, rather than studying foreign language learners' interlangauge pragmatic development. In terms of the speech act of apology, most studies have focused on foreign language learners' pragmatic performance by comparing and contrasting the apology realization strategies utilized by foreign language learners and native speakers. Few cross-sectional studies on the speech act of apology are conducted to explore pragmatic development. Meanwhile, few ILP studies have focused on the relationship between pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence. Moreover, most studies of interlangauge pragmatic competence in China have concentrated on learners' perception ability of some routinized expressions. Few researchers have done cross-sectional studies of pragmatic competence of a specific speech act to compare and contrast the pragmatic competence of students at differentEnglish levels.This paper examines two groups of Chinese English learners'--college students and high school students-pragmatic competence of the speech act of apology and the relationship between pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence. Five questions were raised in this study: 1 .What is the pragmalinguistic proficiency in English evidenced in the apology strategies of two groups of high school students and college students? 2.Do the college students have a higher level of pragmalinguistic proficiency in English than the high school students? 3. What is the sociopragmatic proficiency in English evidenced by sensitivity to contextual factors in choice of apology strategies of high school students and college students? 4. Do the college students have a higher level of sociopragmatic proficiency in English evidenced than the high school students? 5. Do the subjects who have a higher degree of pragmatic awareness would have a higher degree of pragmatic production ability?The participants in this study were forty-six non-English major sophomores from a local university and forty-eight high school students from a local middle school. The subjects' pragmatic awareness had been investigated before a cross-sectional study of the participants' pragmatic competence of the speech act apology was investigated. Statistical results show that the college students had a higher degree of pragmaticawareness than the high school students. Then a Discourse Completion Task/Test (DCT) was employed to collect the apology realization strategies used by the participants. The analysis of apologies was based on the coding scheme for apologies created by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989a). And the participants' pragmatic competence of the speech act of apology was compared from two perspectives-pragmalinguistic competence and sociopragmatic competence. Lastly, the relationship between pragmatic awareness and pragmatic competence was explored.The results show that the college students had a higher level of pragmalinguistic competence of the speech act of apology than the high school students. That is, the college students could utilize more apology strategies than the high school students and there were significant or great significant differences in the frequency of seven apology strategies except the strategy of explanation. Moreover, the college students could employ more illocutionary force indicating devices (IFID)-performative verbs-and internal intensifies and more ways to express the strategy of taking on responsibility than the high school students. However, the two groups of the participants lacked sociopragmatic competence because there was little evidence of...