VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ----------------------------- VŨ THU HÀ NEGATIVE PRAGMATIC TRANSFER IN COMPLAINING BY VIETNAMESE EFL LEARNERS NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ CHUYỂN DI NGỮ DỤNG TIÊU CỰC TRONG HÀNH ĐỘNG NGÔN TỪ PHÀN NÀN CỦA NGƯỜI VIỆT NAM HỌC TIẾNG ANH M.A COMBINED PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 60 22 15 HANOI – 2013 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST-GRADUATE STUDIES ----------------------------- VŨ THU HÀ NEGATIVE PRAGMATIC TRANSFER IN COMPLAINING BY VIETNAMESE EFL LEARNERS NGHIÊN CỨU VỀ CHUYỂN DI NGỮ DỤNG TIÊU CỰC TRONG HÀNH ĐỘNG NGÔN TỪ PHÀN NÀN CỦA NGƯỜI VIỆT NAM HỌC TIẾNG ANH M.A COMBINED PROGRAMME THESIS Field: English Linguistics Code: 60 22 15 Supervisor: Dr. Hà Cẩm Tâm HANOI – 2013 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com v TABLE OF CONTENTS Candidate‘s statement. iii Table of Contents. v List of Abbreviations.
viii List of Tables. ix List of Figures. Aims and scope of the study. Method of the study.
Organization of the study. 5 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW. Speech Act Theory. Brown and Levinson‘s Notion of Face.
Pragmatic Competence and Pragmatic Failure. Pragmatic Transfer in Interlanguage Pragmatics. Negative Pragmatic Transfer. Negative Pragmalinguistic Transfer.
Negative Sociopragmatic Transfer. The Speech Act of Complaint. Studies on Complaints by EFL learners. 36 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.
Data Collection Methods. Data Collection Instruments. Social variables manipulated in data collection instruments. The content of the instruments.
Data collection procedure. Results of the MPQ. The interpretation of the scores. Six selected situations for the DCT.
47 CHAPTER 3: RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS. Negative Pragmalinguistic Transfer. In the choice of complaint strategies. In higher power context (+P).
In lower power context (-P). In equal power context (=P). In unfamiliar context (+D). In familiar context (-D).
In the choice of external modifications. In different power contexts (+P, =P, -P). In different distance contexts (+D, -D). In the choice of internal modifications.
In different power contexts (+P, =P, -P). In different distance contexts (+D, -D). Negative Sociopragmatic Transfer. With regard to social power (P).
In the choice of complaint strategies. In the choice of external modifications. In the choice of internal modifications. With regard to social distance (D).
In the choice of complaint strategies. In the choice of external modifications. In the choice of internal modifications. 70 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com vii PART C: CONCLUSION.
Negative pragmalinguistic transfer. Negative sociopragmatic transfer. Limitations and suggestions for further study. 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 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com viii 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 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com ix 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 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com x 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 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 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. 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, LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 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.
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 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 3 extent to which learners‘ L1 pragmatic knowledge of complaining interferes with their performance of the speech act in English. The negative transfer will be investigated at two levels: pragmalinguistic transfer and sociopragmatic transfer. At the pragmalinguistic level, the study seeks information about the extent to which negative transfer occurs in the learners‘ preferences for complaint strategies, external modifications and internal modifications.
At the sociopragmatic level, the impact of learners‘ L1 perceptions on their choices of complaint strategies, external and internal modifications will be examined. The study is then limited to the investigation of negative transfer seen in the performance of complaining speech act only. Moreover, since the study focuses on the influence of social factors, the Vietnamese learners who are to be chosen as informants will be at the same language proficiency. Research questions The study seeks answer to the following questions: (1) To what extent is negative pragmalinguistic transfer evident in the performance of complaints by Vietnamese EFL learners in the context of the study? (2) To what extent is negative sociopragmatic transfer evident in the performance of complaints by Vietnamese EFL learners in the context of the study? 4.
Method of the study In this study data were collected via Metapragmatic Questionnaires (MPQ) and Discourse Completion Task (DCT). The MPQ is a questionnaire in which informants, who were native speakers of English and Vietnamese learners of English, were asked to assess the 15 given situations based on 3 criteria, namely relative social power, relative social distance and ranking of imposition on the hearer. Out of 15 given situations, 6 situations were selected for the DCT questionnaires. These 6 situations must satisfy the constellation of contextual factors, including social power and social distance.
The DCT questionnaires were then administered to three groups of participants: 20 native speakers of English, 20 native speakers of Vietnamese and 20 Vietnamese learners of English; all the learners are at intermediate proficiency level.