A Study On The Pragmatic Backward Transfer Of L2to L1

Backward transfer (the effect of L2on L1) has become a central and hot research topic in the field of SLA (second language acquisition), which opens up a new field of transfer research. Researchers have begun testing the hypothesis whether L2has an effect on L1at different linguistic levels, such as phonological, lexical, syntactic levels and so on. Then does backward transfer also occur at the pragmatic level (pragmatic backward transfer)? There are rarely scattered researches, let alone a systematic study on pragmatic backward transfer. Therefore, this research is designed to explore the issue of "backward transfer" at the pragmatic level, taking the use of complaint strategies for example.As a result, based on the related researches both at home and abroad, this study makes a systematic argumentation from both theoretical and empirical perspectives in order to manifest the existence of pragmatic backward transfer.On the one hand, a comprehensive description of theories of language transfer and backward transfer, especially the multi-competence theory, the integration continuum, and bilingual’s language system model, is made, laying a solid theoretical foundation for the subsequent analysis. Simultaneously, this study also demonstrates the occurrence of pragmatic backward transfer by means of those theories from the theoretical perspective.On the other hand, the empirical investigation into pragmatic backward transfer is carried out as well, which provides further empirical evidence for this study. The data are collected by means of an elaborately-designed DCT questionnaire, with50native Chinese speakers (NCs),50Chinese learners of English at a high English proficiency level (ELHs), and30native English speakers (NEs) as the three groups of subjects. After the data collection, the researcher makes a quantitative analysis of the data, and compares the ELHs’use of complaint strategies with those of both the NCs and NEs to see whether pragmatic backward transfer occurs in the ELHs’use of complaint strategies in Chinese, with the judging criteria for pragmatic backward transfer as the yardstick. According to the data analysis and the results, the use of complaint strategies in Chinese by the ELHs group is influenced by their L2, English. In other words, the advanced English learners transfer their L2English pragmatic rules to their use of L1, Chinese, which is just the so-called pragmatic backward transfer.In conclusion, this study has significant theoretical, methodological as well as pedagogical implications. It offers us a new perspective, which also makes us have a more comprehensive understanding of language transfer as well as pragmatic transfer. In addition, it also has crucial pedagogical significance for SLA, foreign language teaching, as well as cross-cultural communication.