论文部分内容阅读
【Abstract】Pragmatic competence is an important ingredient in Language learners’ communicative competence. Making apology is one of the speech acts that are the most face threatening for the speakers. This study aims to investigate how Chinese EFL learners, specially, the students of Non-English-Major perform the speech act of apology and to examine whether a Chinese EFL leaner will use different apology strategies in different situations.
【Key words】pragmatic competence; Chinese EFL learners; apology
【作者簡介】任俊超,三亚学院外国语学院。
1.Introduction
Since the notion of “communicative competence” was advanced by Hymes (1972), it has been gradually accepted in language pedagogy. Communicative competence “includes knowledge the speaker-hearer has of what constitutes appropriate as well as correct language behavior and also of what constitutes effective language behavior in relation to particular communicative goal” (Ellis, 1994, p.13). In recent decades, foreign language teachers have gradually realized that one central goal of foreign language teaching is to make language learners master the rules of perceiving and producing language that is appropriate to a specific situation and make them truly effective communicators in the target language. In this sense, the ability to perform the appropriate speech act in a particular situation is regarded as an important aspect of pragmatic competence. As far as the speech act of apology is concerned, apology is very common and important in our daily communication. According to Brown and Levinson (1987), apology is one of the speech acts that are the most face threatening for the speaker. And inappropriate apology can lead to misunderstanding and embarrassment between the speaker and hearer, causing communication breakdown. The speech act of apology has been studied by many researchers from the perspectives of inter-language, cross-cultural, intra-language (Cohen
【Key words】pragmatic competence; Chinese EFL learners; apology
【作者簡介】任俊超,三亚学院外国语学院。
1.Introduction
Since the notion of “communicative competence” was advanced by Hymes (1972), it has been gradually accepted in language pedagogy. Communicative competence “includes knowledge the speaker-hearer has of what constitutes appropriate as well as correct language behavior and also of what constitutes effective language behavior in relation to particular communicative goal” (Ellis, 1994, p.13). In recent decades, foreign language teachers have gradually realized that one central goal of foreign language teaching is to make language learners master the rules of perceiving and producing language that is appropriate to a specific situation and make them truly effective communicators in the target language. In this sense, the ability to perform the appropriate speech act in a particular situation is regarded as an important aspect of pragmatic competence. As far as the speech act of apology is concerned, apology is very common and important in our daily communication. According to Brown and Levinson (1987), apology is one of the speech acts that are the most face threatening for the speaker. And inappropriate apology can lead to misunderstanding and embarrassment between the speaker and hearer, causing communication breakdown. The speech act of apology has been studied by many researchers from the perspectives of inter-language, cross-cultural, intra-language (Cohen