1、1An Interlanguage Pragmatics Study of Request【Abstract】Based on the analysis of letters written by some Chinese college English learners and American native speakers, this paper first verified that Chinese college English learners often commit pragmatic failures concerning request in letters. Then,
2、after discussion of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic failures found in the letters of Chinese college English learners in detail, this paper further provided some implications for the EFL learning and teaching. 【Key words】Interlanguage pragmatics Request Pragmatic failure Pragmatic competence 【中图
3、分类号】G642 【文献标识码】A 【文章编号】16744810（2013）05011001 The empirical study The hypothesis in this paper is to find whether pragmatic failures often occur in Chinese college English learners writing in addition to their exististence in spoken discourse. The procedure of the investigation is followed by Xu（20
4、01）. 1Data collection Eightyseven questionnaires for the Chinese students are 2received when invalid data （those letters which can not be finished or recognized） are excluded. Before writing the letters, the teacher explains these six situations in Chinese in order to make student clearly understand
5、 their task. Enough time will be allowed in order to let students finish those letters. Twenty questionnaires for the American students are received as the data for this research. 2Data analysis and discussion Just like the oral expression, the investigation shows that pragmatic failures also occur
6、when Chinese English learners express the requests in the written form. The concept of pragmatic failure originates form Thomas（1983）.She comments that the pragmatic failure has occurred on any occasion “on which H（the hearer） perceives the forces of S（the speakers） utterances as other than S intend
7、ed he or she perceive it.”（ibid:94）. According to him, pragmatic failure is classified into two categories: pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. The former one “occurs when the pragmatic force mapped by speaker onto a given utterance is systematically different from the force most fr
8、equently assigned to it by native speakers of the target language” 3（ibid:99）. And the latter one “stems from crossculturally different perceptions of what constitutes appropriate linguistic behavior”（ibid:99）. In the next part, we will analyze students pragmatic failures in letters according to thi
9、s kind of divisions. Implication for EFL teaching As the development of globalization, acrossculture communication has become an urgent need for all the countries. To make a successful acrosscommunication, you should not only know how to express the correct grammatical form, but also need to appropr
10、iately express the illocutionary force in certain context of situation. The traditional grammatical method of teaching a foreign language fails to fulfill this task. It emphasizes the linguistic competence, but the research has shown that high levels of grammatical competence do not guarantee high l
11、evels of pragmatic competence. In order to compensate this weak point, communicative teaching has come into being. The emphasis of this method is to improve the students communicative competence. CP originates from the American anthropologist and sociolinguist, Hymes. According to Rose （ibid）, the t
12、echniques for PCR consist of four parts. Firstly, the teacher presents some interesting 4and problematic examples concerning to the pragmatic character to students for discussion. Secondly, it is necessary for teacher to specify the topic of pragmatics and explicitly explain it to the students. Thir
13、dly, the teacher asks the students to collect data on this topic from their L1. Last but not least, the teacher analyses the data which are collected from film or novel in the target language. The task of this lesson is to teach the students how to express and response to requests. The students book
14、 lists three ways to express the request and some models to show how to accept and refuse them. Only if you can express the request can you accept or refuse it. Here, I mainly discuss how to teach students perform the request by using different strategies. Conclusion Investigation of request strateg
15、ies based on different social statues and rank of impositions in students letters shows that pragmatic failures concerning request also occur in the letters in addition to their existence in spoken discourse. It is apparent that those failures will hinder the development of the students pragmatic competence. 参考文献 51Bachman, L. Fundamental Considerations in Language TestingM. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1990 责任编辑：王以富
