Bi-directional Transfer In Chinese EFL Learners’ Requesting Behaviour

Since the concept of interlanguage was put forward in Selinker(1972), language transfer has become an important issue in the field of second language acquisition. And the researches of language transfer have made certain achievement both on theoretic construction and on empirical study in past decades. In the previous researches, the focus is mainly on the language transfer from the learners’ first language(L1) to their second language(L2), that is, the influence of the learners L1 to their L2. In recent years, with the development of second language acquisition research, the language transfer research gradually shifts from the one directional study, which refers to the direction from L1 to L2, to bi-directional study. And the bi-directional property of language transfer is becoming a new research trend.This thesis bases itself on the theories of bi-directional transfer, and analyses the bi-directional transfer phenomena which occur in the requesting speech acts made by Chinese learners of English, trying to find out whether bi-directional transfer exists in Chinese EFL learners’ requesting behaviour; whether the forward transfer and the backward transfer are on the same degree; and whether the degree of bi-directional varies depending on the levels of the English proficiency the learners possess.The data in the empirical quantitative study designed to answer the research questions are collected by means of Discourse-completion Tasks(DCTs). The two-language-version questionnaires are delivered to 120 subjects, who are classified into four groups, which are the English native speakers(ENSs), the Chinese native speakers(CNSs), the intermediate EFL learners(Inter EFL) and the advanced EFL learners(Adv EFL). The questionnaire includes 15 discourses in different scenarios, 6 of which are requesting behaviour discourses designed to collect the data of the present study and the rest of which are other pragmatic discourses(thankful, apology, refusal etc.) designed to ensure the validity and reliability of the study.The results of the study show that bi-directional transfer actually exists in Chinese EFL learners’ requesting behaviour, and the forward transfer is more obvious than the backward transfer. The forward transfer is more likely to occur in the performances of less proficient L2 learners and the backward transfer could only be found in the performances of advanced learners.This study has some significant implications in building the theoretical structure of interlanguage pragmatics and pedagogy. The results of the study help a lot to optimize the research framework of language transfer, and to bring us a new view of SLA, cross-culture communication and foreign language teaching. And the findings in this thesis would also provide the second language learners with some inspirations of making use of the properties of bi-directional transfer to perform better in both mother language and target language.