A Study Of Chinese Efl Learners' Pragmatic Development Of Refusal In English

Refusal is a very common speech act performed by most native speakers of different languages in social communication, but it is also a rather complicated speech act posing a big difficulty for people in that it has the face-threatening nature. The present research is an exploratory investigation on the interlanguage pragmatic development of English refusal performed by Chinese EFL learners with respect to different English proficiency levels.The present research was guided by three questions as follow:(1) What are the features of the pragmalinguistic competence of Chinese EFL learners with respect to different English proficiency levels in the performance of English refusal?(2) What are the features of the sociopragmatic competence of Chinese EFL learners with respect to different English proficiency levels in the performance of English refusal?(3) Is there evidence of negative pragmatic transfer from L1 Chinese in English refusal performed by Chinese EFL learners?The present research adopted a cross-sectional design. There were altogether 156 subjects for this research, including two groups of Chinese EFL learners at different levels of English proficiency (41 lower-proficient learners and 42 advanced learners), one group of English native speakers (35 subjects) and one group of Chinese native speakers (38 subjects). The instruments applied to the present research consisted of a background questionnaire and a discourse completion test (DCT) questionnaire with the former presenting the demographic information related to learner subjects and with the latter providing the production data of refusal from all subject groups. Learner subjects'pragmalinguistic competence was examined in the framework of refusal strategies based on the coding scheme of Beebe at al (1990) and internal modifiers in terms of the classification of Wang (2001). Learner subjects'sociopragmatic competence was analyzed by such social variables as social status and familiarity. An interview of some subjects was also carried out to reinforce the data statistics and analysis. The data were analyzed and explained mainly based on interlanguage pragmatics, the speech act theory, and politeness theory.The results of the present research showed that according to their performance on the refusal behaviors, advanced learners had a much higher level of pragmalinguistic competence than lower-proficient learners, which indicated that the development of the learner subjects'pragmalinguistic competence was positively linked to their L2 proficiency. As for learners'sociopragmatic competence, it seemed that their sociopragmatic competence did not have a positive relationship with the increase of L2 proficiency. Even though the advanced learners did better than the lower-proficient learners, both of the two groups of subjects still had much trouble in reaching the knowledge of target pragmatic norms, especially when some social variables, such as social status and familiarity, came to interfere. With respect to the relationship between pragmatic transfer and pragmatic development, evidence indicated that the amount of pragmatic transfer decreased with the development of the learners'English level. The lower-proficient learners got much easier to transfer some refusal strategies and pragmatic principles from their native language into the target language refusals. Negative pragmatic transfer reduced when the learner's grammatical competence achieves the advanced level, especially in the pragmalinguistic aspect, which indicated that the finding of the present research did not support Takahashi & Beebe'positive correlation hypothesis that L1 pragmatic transfer increased with learners'L2 proficiency.The present research was one of the rare studies on the developmental issue of ILP to investigate the speech act of refusal, which might make a supplement for the acquisition of ILP, enrich the bulk of research on the pragmatic development, and shed light on pragmatic instruction.