Pragmatic transfer and proficiency in refusals of Korean EFL learners

This study investigated the occurrence of pragmatic transfer in the refusals of Korean EFL learners at three proficiency levels due to the cross-cultural differences in refusal patterns in Korean and English.; Forty native speakers of Korean, 37 native speakers of English, 22 beginning, 43 intermediate, and 46 advanced Korean EFL learners participated in this study. Data were collected using a written discourse completion test taken from Takahashi and Beebe (1987) and Beebe et al. (1990), which elicited refusals of requests, invitations, offers, and suggestions from interlocutors of different status (i.e., higher, equal, and lower status). The data were also categorized according to the refusal taxonomy of Takahashi and Beebe (1987) and Beebe et al. (1990), and were analyzed in terms of the frequency and content of the semantic formulas used by the subjects. The learners' refusals were compared to those of native speakers of Korean and English in order to examine the extent of pragmatic transfer from Korean to English.; Evidence of pragmatic transfer was found in the refusals of learners at all three proficiency levels. Further, pragmatic transfer increased as learners' proficiency increased, supporting Takahashi and Beebe (1987)'s positive correlation hypothesis. Beginning level learners' refusals, due to a lack of target language knowledge, tended to be short and abrupt, deviating from both native and target language speakers' refusals. Intermediate level learners were able to express Korean norms of politeness in their target language refusals to a greater degree than were beginning level learners. Advanced level learners' refusals, however, resembled those of native speakers of Korean to the greatest degree. They had sufficient linguistic means to transfer the forms as well as the tentative, figurative, and philosophical tone of their native language to the target language. In addition, advanced learners were at times more verbose than native speakers of Korean or English since they elaborated and mitigated their refusals by using the preferred semantic formulas of both their native and target languages.; The implications of the findings for teaching and learning pragmatics in the EFL classroom were provided.