Pragmatic Fossilization Of Comforting Speech Act In Chinese EFL Learners

Comforting, as a common speech act often used in our daily life, is defined as a kind ofspeech act which the speaker (S) will perform to the hearer (H) as a reaction to H’s negativeemotions (involving anxiety, grief, sorrow, or disappointment, etc.) with the goal ofalleviating or lessening H’s emotional distress. Timely and effective comforting will make theother else recover quickly from the distressed conditions. Previous researches on comfortingspeech act mainly focused on the perspectives of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, andcross-cultural contrastive analysis. There are very few studies of comforting speech acttargeted at Chinese EFL learners from the perspective of pragmatic fossilization.Fossilization, which is universal in language learning and hinders learners’ languagedevelopment towards the target language, is a huge barrier for successful language learning. Ithas attracted widespread attention among SLA researchers at home and abroad who havealready proved the universal existence of fossilization at the phonological, semantic andsyntactic levels. The fossilization of pragmatic competence which is also a part of languagecompetence is attracting some attention and the analysis of specific pragmatic competence israrely seen.Interlanguage pragmatics (ILP), as an interdisciplinary branch of SLA and pragmatics, ina narrow sense, refers to the investigation of “nonnative speakers’ comprehension andproduction of speech acts, and the acquisition of L2-related speech act knowledge”(Kasper&Dahl,1991). Therefore, within the framework of ILP and pragmatic fossilization, the presentstudy attempts to investigate whether pragmatic fossilization exists among Chinese EFLlearners with regard to comforting speech act. It does so by comparing Chinese EFL learners’and English native speakers’ performance of comforting speech act which were collected through a discourse completion test (DCT) questionnaire about comforting.Based on the classification of comforting strategies proposed by Brant R. Burleson(1985), this paper conducts a quantitative analysis through One-Way ANOVA and MultipleComparisons by SPSS13.0, the results of which show that: the three groups of Chinese EFLlearners hold no significant differences in their selection of comforting strategies while somedifferences exists between Chinese EFL learners and English native speakers. The results ofstatistical analysis manifest the existence of pragmatic fossilization among Chinese EFLlearners with respect to their performance of comforting speech act. In addition, the presentstudy points out two possible causal factors of pragmatic fossilization by analyzing thecollected linguistic data, one is L1influence and the other is insufficient input. Someimplications and suggestions are also provided for English learning and teaching so as toprevent and resolve pragmatic fossilization.