A Study On Chinese EFL Learners’ Pragmatic Backward Transfer

Relationship between language transfer and second language learning has been a focus in the research fields of second language acquisition and foreign language teaching. Backward transfer is not as obvious as transfer of native language knowledge to second language system, but to some degree it does change learners’ native language knowledge in many aspects. At present, researches of backward transfer mostly focused on semantics and morphology, and scholars rarely study backward transfer from the perspective of pragmatics. However, in the field of SLA, researchers have gradually realized that pragmatic rule of language is also very important to second language learning. Linguistic knowledge does not ensure that foreign language learners can use language properly. Therefore, it is extremely necessary and meaningful to explore backward transfer at the pragmatic level.This thesis attends to verify the existence of pragmatic backward transfer. Data collected in this research is gained by DCT(Discourse Completion Test). All the participants in this study are divided into four groups in accordance to their English proficiency: 37 non-English major freshmen, 34 non English major juniors, 50 English major juniors, 37 English major postgraduates in second grade. By SPSS software, this thesis makes statistical analysis on connection between professional background(English major or Non-English major), English learning time and English proficiency and compliment response strategy in Chinese. This thesis aims to study backward transfer effect of English as a second language on Chinese as a first language.The results show that different degrees of pragmatic transfer existed in the processof learning English when they are responding to the compliment using their mother tongue. With the improvement of Chinese EFL learners’ English level, pragmatic transfer presented the tendency of increasing.In conclusion,this thesis has some theoretical significance and realistic meaning to prove the existence of pragmatics backward transfer in compliment response. It offer us a new perspective, and makes us have a more comprehensive understanding of language transfer as well as pragmatic backward transfer, which will help bilinguals improve language competence.