Pragmatic Transfer and its Relation to Proficiency

The ultimate goal of teaching/learning a language is to enable learners to fully communicate in a social context. It is not merely to speak like a native speaker, rather to be able to use the language appropriately in a social context to serve social needs and purposes. In addition to knowing what to say correctly, a learner has to know when, how and why to say things appropriately in a social context. This is known as pragmatic competence. A learner who is not pragmatically competent utilized his first pragmatic norms when communicating in the L2 language. This pragmatic transfer causes communication breakdown and the message intended by the speaker/writer is not understood. That is why a pragmatic failure resulted by pragmatic transfer is believed to be more harmful than a linguistic error. This book deals with pragmatic transfer of Yemeni learners of English as reflected in their performance in the speech act of refusal. It examines the relationship between pragmatic transfer and proficiency. The book concludes with some pedagogical implications that could be implemented in the EFL context.