چکیده:
Investigating transfer of one‟s pragmatic knowledge of first language to his second or foreign language has been one of the areas of interest for researchers. However, there are contradictory results even within the scarce studies which have addressed transferability. This study was an attempt to investigate perceived pragmatic transferability of L1 refusal strategies by Persian EFL learners. Specifically, the effect of degree of imposition of the context and eliciting act type on transferability rate was investigated. To this end, a DCT was developed with the help of 60 (male & female) Persian EFL learners. This DCT was then administered to 74 Persian EFL learners as the main participants of the study. The results showed the existence of the interactional effect of both degree of imposition and type of eliciting act on the learners‟ transferability rate. This suggests that learners‟ perception of the differences in conditions under which they refuse has an effect on their choices of the pragmatic aspects to be transferred to English.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Refusals are used in the form of response to a variety of speech acts such as offers, invitations, requests and suggestions in different cross-cultural ways (Gass & Selinker, 2008).
Looking at these strategies simply from contrastive perspective they compared Persian and English refusal, exploring the frequency, shift and content of semantic formulas with regard to the language learners‟ proficiency level (lower-intermediate, intermediate and upper-intermediate) and types of eliciting acts (requests, invitations, offers and suggestions).
Due to the fact that there were no ready made questionnaires designed specifically for the purpose of this study, three preliminary studies were conducted in order to construct a suitable transferability judgment questionnaire, addressing the effect of degree of imposition and the type of eliciting act on transferability rate by Iranian EFL learners.
The Persian format of a discourse completion task (DCT) including 12 situations in which a refusal was used in response to the eliciting acts of offer, suggestion, request and invitation to three different interlocutors of high, equal and low status to that of the learner was used.
Results The results of the repeated measures analysis on the effect of the degree of imposition of the situations and eliciting act type on transferability rate are presented in Tables 1 through 4, as well as figure 1.
Table 3 Means of the Interactional Effects of the Degree of Imposition and Eliciting Act Type on Transferability Rate Imposition Low High Offer 7.