Although L2 pragmatic competence is essential in intercultural communication, many studies show that most of language learners, even those with advanced grammatical competence, lack necessary knowledge of performing speech acts in the target language. Lack of L2 pragmatic knowledge has led to pragmatic failure or error, which is considered to have more serious consequences than grammatical errors because native speakers tend to see pragmatic errors as offensive and rude rather than simply as demonstrating lack of knowledge. This can lead to misjudgment or miscommunication between them and native speakers. Moreover, the findings of many studies indicate that pragmatic failure or errors are to a large extent caused by the interference of the learners’ pragmatic knowledge in their native language with their performance in the target language, or in other words, the negative pragmatic transfer. Many learners, in performing speech acts in the target language, translate social norms of their native culture or linguistic expressions of their native language into their L2 performance, which are, in most cases, not seen appropriate by native speakers. This study investigates the negative pragmatic transfer in the performance of the facethreatening act of complaining by Vietnamese EFL learners at both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic level. Pragmalinguistically, the study is aimed at detecting the occurrences of negative transfer in learners’ choices of complaint strategies, external modifications and internal modifications. Sociopragmatically, it seeks to examine the impact of learners’ L1based perceptions of two contextual factors, including social power (P) and social distance (D), on learners’ realization of the speech act of complaining in the target language. The data were collected via Discourse Completion Test (DCT) questionnaires. The DCT questionnaire was comprised of 6 situations that were picked up based on the results of Metapragmatic Questionnaire (MPQ) on 22 native speakers of English. DCT questionnaires were then administered to 20 native speakers of Vietnamese, 20 native speakers of English, and 20 Vietnamese learners of English, whose English proficiency was assessed as intermediate. The findings of the study have revealed the evidences of negative pragmatic transfer in learners’ interlanguage complaints. At the pragmalinguistic level, negative transfer was most strikingly evident when learners complained to people of lower and equal status. While native speakers of English managed to keep their complaints at a certain level of indirectness across power contexts, learners, just like native speakers of Vietnamese, tended to be very direct and explicit in complaining in higher and equal power contexts. They quite frequently opted for the most direct strategies on the scale and perhaps the most avoided strategies by native speakers of English – Strategy 7 (Explicit Blame on Behavior) and Strategy 8 (Explicit Blame on Person). Another occurrence of negative pragmalinguistic transfer was seen in learners’ modest use of external modifiers in their complaints. It seemed that both native speakers of Vietnamese and learners did not support their complaints as well as native speakers of English. This might have made their complaints sound straight, explicit and even confronting according to the English speakers’ perceptions. At the sociopragmatic level, Vietnamese learners of English appeared to negatively translate their L1 emphasis of power differences into their IL performance. They may have been influenced by their L1based belief that being polite means highlighting the status differences where they actually exist, whereas native speakers of English may think differently; being polite means denying the power differences even when they actually exist. In highlighting the power differences like that, learners might be judged as insincere, bossy or even rude by the other interlocutors in intercultural communication. The main findings of the study, therefore, provided language teachers, educators and learners with precious information about the possible interferences of L1 with IL performance. This will surely raise their awareness of developing learners’ L2 pragmatic knowledge and pragmatic competence in the English language teaching and learning.
i ABSTRACT Although L2 pragmatic competence is essential in intercultural communication, many studies show that most of language learners, even those with advanced grammatical competence, lack necessary knowledge of performing speech acts in the target language. Lack of L2 pragmatic knowledge has led to pragmatic failure or error, which is considered to have more serious consequences than grammatical errors because native speakers tend to see pragmatic errors as offensive and rude rather than simply as demonstrating lack of knowledge. This can lead to misjudgment or miscommunication between them and native speakers. Moreover, the findings of many studies indicate that pragmatic failure or errors are to a large extent caused by the interference of the learners’ pragmatic knowledge in their native language with their performance in the target language, or in other words, the negative pragmatic transfer. Many learners, in performing speech acts in the target language, translate social norms of their native culture or linguistic expressions of their native language into their L2 performance, which are, in most cases, not seen appropriate by native speakers. This study investigates the negative pragmatic transfer in the performance of the face- threatening act of complaining by Vietnamese EFL learners at both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic level. Pragmalinguistically, the study is aimed at detecting the occurrences of negative transfer in learners’ choices of complaint strategies, external modifications and internal modifications. Sociopragmatically, it seeks to examine the impact of learners’ L1- based perceptions of two contextual factors, including social power (P) and social distance (D), on learners’ realization of the speech act of complaining in the target language. The data were collected via Discourse Completion Test (DCT) questionnaires. The DCT questionnaire was comprised of 6 situations that were picked up based on the results of Metapragmatic Questionnaire (MPQ) on 22 native speakers of English. DCT questionnaires were then administered to 20 native speakers of Vietnamese, 20 native speakers of English, and 20 Vietnamese learners of English, whose English proficiency was assessed as intermediate. The findings of the study have revealed the evidences of negative pragmatic transfer in learners’ interlanguage complaints. At the pragmalinguistic level, negative transfer was most strikingly evident when learners complained to people of lower and equal status. While native ii speakers of English managed to keep their complaints at a certain level of indirectness across power contexts, learners, just like native speakers of Vietnamese, tended to be very direct and explicit in complaining in higher and equal power contexts. They quite frequently opted for the most direct strategies on the scale and perhaps the most avoided strategies by native speakers of English – Strategy 7 (Explicit Blame on Behavior) and Strategy 8 (Explicit Blame on Person). Another occurrence of negative pragmalinguistic transfer was seen in learners’ modest use of external modifiers in their complaints. It seemed that both native speakers of Vietnamese and learners did not support their complaints as well as native speakers of English. This might have made their complaints sound straight, explicit and even confronting according to the English speakers’ perceptions. At the sociopragmatic level, Vietnamese learners of English appeared to negatively translate their L1 emphasis of power differences into their IL performance. They may have been influenced by their L1-based belief that being polite means highlighting the status differences where they actually exist, whereas native speakers of English may think differently; being polite means denying the power differences even when they actually exist. In highlighting the power differences like that, learners might be judged as insincere, bossy or even rude by the other interlocutors in intercultural communication. The main findings of the study, therefore, provided language teachers, educators and learners with precious information about the possible interferences of L1 with IL performance. This will surely raise their awareness of developing learners’ L2 pragmatic knowledge and pragmatic competence in the English language teaching and learning. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Candidate’s statement i Acknowledgement ii Abstract iii Table of Contents v List of Abbreviations viii List of Tables ix List of Figures x PART A: INTRODUCTION 1 1. Rationale 1 2. Aims and scope of the study 2 3. Research questions 3 4. Method of the study 3 5. Organization of the study 4 PART B: DEVELOPMENT 5 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW 5 1.1. Pragmatics 5 1.2. Speech Act Theory 6 1.3. Politeness Theories 10 1.3.1. Brown and Levinson’s Notion of Face 10 1.3.2. Social Variables 12 1.4. Interlanguage Pragmatics 14 1.5. Pragmatic Competence and Pragmatic Failure 15 1.5.1. Pragmatic competence 15 1.5.2. Pragmatic failure 16 1.6. Pragmatic Transfer in Interlanguage Pragmatics 19 1.7. Negative Pragmatic Transfer 20 1.7.1. Negative Pragmalinguistic Transfer 21 1.7.2. Negative Sociopragmatic Transfer 24 1.8. The Speech Act of Complaint 26 1.9. Modifications 30 1.10. Studies on Complaints by EFL learners 30 CHAPTER 2: METHODOLOGY 36 2.1. Research Questions 36 2.2. Participants 36 iv 2.3. Data Collection Methods 37 2.4. Data Collection Instruments 39 2.4.1. Social variables manipulated in data collection instruments 39 2.4.2. The content of the instruments 41 2.5. Data collection procedure 42 2.6. Results of the MPQ 42 2.6.1. The interpretation of the scores 44 2.6.2. Six selected situations for the DCT 44 2.7. Analytical framework 45 2.7.1. Complaint strategies 45 2.7.2. External modifications 46 2.7.3. Internal modifications 47 CHAPTER 3: RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS 49 3.1. Negative Pragmalinguistic Transfer 49 3.1.1. In the choice of complaint strategies 49 3.1.1.1. In higher power context (+P) 49 3.1.1.2. In lower power context (-P) 51 3.1.1.3. In equal power context (=P) 52 3.1.1.4. In unfamiliar context (+D) 54 3.1.1.5. In familiar context (-D) 55 3.1.2. In the choice of external modifications 56 3.1.2.1. In different power contexts (+P, =P, -P) 56 3.1.2.2. In different distance contexts (+D, -D) 58 3.1.3. In the choice of internal modifications 59 3.1.3.1. In different power contexts (+P, =P, -P) 59 3.1.3.2. In different distance contexts (+D, -D) 61 3.1.4. Summary 62 3.2. Negative Sociopragmatic Transfer 63 3.2.1. With regard to social power (P) 63 3.2.1.1. In the choice of complaint strategies 63 3.2.1.2. In the choice of external modifications 65 3.2.1.3. In the choice of internal modifications 66 3.2.2. With regard to social distance (D) 67 3.2.2.1. In the choice of complaint strategies 67 3.2.2.2. In the choice of external modifications 68 3.2.2.3. In the choice of internal modifications 69 3.2.3. Summary 70 v PART C: CONCLUSION 71 1. Conclusions 71 1.1. Negative pragmalinguistic transfer 71 1.2. Negative sociopragmatic transfer 72 2. Implications 73 3. Limitations and suggestions for further study 74 REFERENCES 75 APPENDIXES I Appendix 1: Metapragmatic Questionnaire (MPQ) I Appendix 2A: Discourse Completion Task (DCT) (English Version) VI Appendix 2B: Discourse Completion Task (DCT) (Vietnamese Version) IX vi LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS SLA Second Language Acquisition CCP Cross-Cultural Pragmatics CP Contrastive Pragmatics ILP Interlanguage Pragmatics FTA Face Threatening Act DCT Discourse Completion Test MPQ Metapragmatic Questionnaire L1 The first language L2 The second language EFL English as a Foreign Language ENSs Native speakers of English VLs Vietnamese learners of English VNSs Native speakers of Vietnamese IL Interlanguage NL Native language TL Target language vii LIST OF TABLES Table a : Assessment of social variables by native speakers of English Table b : Assessment of social variables by Vietnamese learners of English Table 1 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to +P Table 2 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to –P Table 3 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to =P Table 4 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to +D Table 5 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to –D Table 6 : Choice of external modification with respect to P Table 7 : Choice of external modification with respect to D Table 8 : Choice of internal modification with respect to P Table 9 : Choice of downgraders with respect to P Table 10 : Choice of upgraders with respect to P Table 11 : Choice of internal modification with respect to D Table 12 : Choice of downgraders with respect to D Table 13 : Choice of upgraders with respect to D viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to +P Figure 2 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to –P Figure 3 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to =P Figure 4 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to +D Figure 5 : Choice of complaint strategies with respect to -D Figure 6 : English speakers’ choice of complaint strategies across P Figure 7 : Vietnamese speakers’ choice of complaint strategies across P Figure 8 : Learners’ choice of complaint strategies across P Figure 9 : Choice of external modifications across P Figure 10 : Choice of downgraders across P Figure 11 : Choice of upgraders across P Figure 12 : English speakers’ choice of complaint strategies across D Figure 13 : Vietnamese speakers’ choice of complaint strategies across D Figure 14 : Learners’ choice of complaint strategies across D Figure 15 : Choice of external modifications across D Figure 16 : Choice of downgraders across D Figure 17 : Choice of upgraders across D 1 PART A INTRODUCTION 1. Rationale The nonstop growing globalization trends have gradually turned the world into a so- called “Global Village”, where people from different backgrounds live, study, work and communicate together. Such a need for intercultural communication has led to the increasing dominance of the English language, which has always been referred to as an international language of business, commerce and education. The English language teaching and learning has accordingly enjoyed more attention than ever before and undergone significant changes to meet learners’ novel demands. It is now more important for a learner to become a competent user of English in real communication than to be a master of English grammar rules and structures for reading and translation as in the past. Correspondingly, there has been a steady shift of focus in the English language teaching from building up learners’ grammatical competence to developing their pragmatic competence. Pragmatic competence, as noted by Kasper (1997), is “knowledge of communicative action and how to carry it out, and the ability to use language appropriately according to context”. However, intercultural communication involves interlocutors with diverse sociocultural norms and linguistic conventions, and thus, a clash of perceptions of appropriateness in communication is very likely unavoidable, which also means that miscommunication in intercultural contexts can occur. Intercultural miscommunication can be attributed to many causes, among which are learners’ incomplete understandings of the other interlocutors’ sociocultural values together with learners’ falling back on their L1 norms in realizing speech acts in communication. This assumption has interested linguistic researchers and educators a lot, and has drawn more of their attention to a new SLA discipline that studies learners’ enactment of linguistic action in the second language, namely interlanguage pragmatics (ILP). ILP is still a young discipline, which as claimed by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989), is needed in order to discover “how learners do things with words in a second language” (p.9). ILP focuses on linguistic actions, speech acts and the realization by learners to understand what might interfere with a learner’s comprehension and production of pragmatic meaning. It is, thus, 2 interested in identifying the obstacles to or failures of learners’ appropriate production of pragmatics. Pragmatic transfer, among some other concerns, can be seen as the major focus of ILP studies. Studies on pragmatic transfer, especially negative pragmatic transfer, examine the influence of learners’ L1-based perceptions of politeness and appropriateness and their L1 performance of a speech act on their realization of the same speech act in L2, which might cause pragmatic failure. Studies on pragmatic transfer, hence, will provide teachers and learners with precious knowledge about the pragmatic errors learners might make in intercultural communication and help them find ways to be more appropriate, polite and pragmatically competent in intercultural contexts. Pragmatic transfer has received much interest worldwide with a wide range of studies on the realization of such speech acts as apologies, requests, complaints, chastisement, or compliments by Japanese, Turkish, German, Arabian, Danish, Thai EFL learners and so on. However, the number of studies on pragmatic transfer by Vietnamese EFL is very modest. Therefore, more studies on this issue are in need in order to promote Vietnamese teachers and learners’ understanding of the possible influence of L1 on learners’ interlanguage performance. As a response to the need to enrich the literature about the occurrences of pragmatic transfer by Vietnamese learners, this study investigates the negative pragmatic transfer in the performance of the face-threatening act of complaining by Vietnamese EFL learners and the social factors that lead to the negative transfer. Negative pragmatic transfer is chosen for the study because negative transfer, not positive transfer, deals with the inappropriate translation of L1 norms into interlanguage performance and it is considered as one of the main causes of learners’ pragmatic failures. Besides, complaining is picked up as the head act in investigation as complaining is an act that can hardly be avoided in everyday communication but it is very likely to put both the speaker and the hearer at risk of losing their faces unless the complaint is made with caution. 2. Aims and scope of the study The study aims to find out the evidence of negative pragmatic transfer in the performance of complaints by Vietnamese EFL learners. In other words, it will examine the [...]... research are that: In different societies and different communities, people speak differently; these differences in ways of speaking are profound and systematic, they reflect different cultural values, or at least different hierarchies of values; different ways of speaking, different communication styles, can be explained and made sense of in terms of independently established different cultural values... original theory, suggested that felicity conditions are not merely dimensions on which utterances can go wrong, but are actually jointly constitutive of the various illocutionary forces He then recommended a classification of felicity conditions into four kinds, including 8 preparatory conditions, sincerity conditions, propositional content conditions and Essential conditions (Searle, 1979, p 44) Another... and indirectness in complaining as well as some previous studies on complaining are discussed Chapter 3 discusses issues of methodology and outlines the study design, data collection instruments, procedure of data collection, and analytical framework Chapter 4 presents the data analysis and discusses the findings on the negative pragmatic transfer on the choices of complaint strategies, external modifications... speech act research Many researchers criticize traditional speech act studies for basing their findings on simulated speech in isolated and single-sentence utterances that are divorced from the context (cited in Lin, 2005, p 32) The second area of the theory being criticized is the notion of indirect speech acts According to Levinson (1983), basically, the diversity of actual language challenges the theory... to his wife “I hereby divorce you” can go wrong in that there is simply no such procedure in Britain where merely by uttering divorce can be achieved Based on different ways a performative can fail to come off, he produced a set of conditions, which he called “felicity conditions”, for them to meet if those performatives are to succeed or be “happy” The felicity conditions are divided by him into three... emphasis of status differences into their IL performance; “Japanese consider it polite to emphasize the status differences when there actually exist such differences, whereas, from the American perspective, being polite is conveyed by denying that status differences do exist” (Takahashi 1995, p 110) Tam (2005), in her doctorate dissertation on requests by Vietnamese EFL learners, discovered that Australian... styles into learners’ IL performance One dimension of communicative style is the direct/ indirect dimension As noted by them, direct communicative style refers to explicitly stating one’s feelings, wants, and needs whereas indirect style stands for verbal messages that camouflage and conceal speakers’ true intensions in terms of their wants, needs and goals in the discourse situation For instance, Americans... clearly and directly to others while Japanese people are expected to be involved with others with the utmost care not to reveal one’s feeling directly This indicates that Americans are used to be direct in communication, presenting their ideas openly and straightforwardly whereas Japanese are so used to indirect 26 communication, reading the minds of the others and presenting one’s idea indirectly (Kume,... entirely pragmatic and has no direct and simple correlation with sentence-form or –meaning; there are thus simply no significance in distinguishing between direct or indirect speech acts Last but not least, the speech act theory does not emphasize the fact that the realization of speech acts is culture-specific Recent studies have proved that there are cross-cultural differences in the realization... power than the addressee, Australian speakers tended to be even more indirect than Vietnamese EFL learners Many other studies on EFL learners of Asian origins also provided the same findings; that is, their IL performance is often negatively influenced by their L1 social norms that emphasize differences in social power and social distance between two interlocutors in interpersonal communication 25 . 74 REFERENCES 75 APPENDIXES I Appendix 1: Metapragmatic Questionnaire (MPQ) I Appendix 2A: Discourse Completion Task (DCT) (English Version) VI Appendix 2B: Discourse Completion Task (DCT) (Vietnamese Version). external modifications 56 3.1.2.1. In different power contexts (+P, =P, -P) 56 3.1.2.2. In different distance contexts (+D, -D) 58 3.1.3. In the choice of internal modifications 59 3.1.3.1. In different. classification of felicity conditions into four kinds, including 8 preparatory conditions, sincerity conditions, propositional content conditions and Essential conditions (Searle, 1979, p. 44).