Abstract

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This study adopts the “Oral Discourse Completion Test” as an elicitation instrument to investigate the relationship between the Chinese EFL learners’ oral English pragmatic competence and the occurrence of pragmatic transfer in the perspective of the frequency of semantic formulas and discourse content. The Chinese EFL learners’ oral English pragmatic competence is defined as a kind of integrated linguistic knowledge that enables learners to communicate appropriately across languages, and it is measured by College Spoken English Test (CSET) which is a national test that has both reliability and validity. The Chinese EFL learners are divided into three (low, intermediate and advanced) levels according to their scores in CSET. The study reveals that four types of pragmatic transfer are found in the production of the Chinese EFL learners with different levels of oral English pragmatic competence, namely apparent pragmatic transfer, unapparent pragmatic transfer, pragmatic over-transfer and pragmatic under-transfer. Data analyses indicate that a generally inverted U-shaped relation exists between oral English pragmatic competence and pragmatic transfer. As the oral English pragmatic competence of the Chinese EFL learners changes from the low to intermediate level, the degree of pragmatic transfer increases; as the oral English pragmatic competence of the Chinese EFL learners changes from the intermediate to advanced level, the degree of pragmatic transfer decreases. The study concludes by pointing out that the development of pragmatic competence is dynamic, which is different from that of language proficiency. It is necessary to improve EFL learners’ oral pragmatic competence by adopting various teaching strategies according to their different levels.

 

Key words: pragmatic competence; pragmatic transfer; foreign language learning