2.2 Non-linguistic perspectives of transfer
Non-linguistic perspectives towards transfer are multi-factorial. Wolfson (1989) discussed the transfer of NL-based conversational rules. She observed that the learner had a tendency of using conversational rules other than that from the TL to finish an interaction or playing his part in an interaction to impress the audience that he is trying to be cooperative. Such transfer had an impact on the development of the learner’s TL communicative competence (Richards & Sukwiwat, 1983).
Culture-specific communicative styles were evidenced by Richards (1974) who suggested that social factors are closely related to transfer and he looked into how Singaporean learners of English manipulated their learned English (Richards, 1982). A recent cross-cultural study of transfer is by Clyne et al (1994) who analyzed the responses of the immigrants in Melbourne to arguments, identification and cultural styles. They concluded that, on the one hand, transferred cultural values should be respected and, on the other hand, to succeed in cross-cultural communication, immigrants had to observe the Cooperative Principle (CP). Their results in cluster analysis indicated that immigrants broadly fall into two groups in terms of transferred cultural attributes. In Group A are the Austrians, Germans, Czechs, Croatians, Macedonians, Russians, Serbia’s, and Spanish, with Greek and Polish as peripheral; and Group B: Cambodian, Chinese, Laotian, Thai, and Vietnamese, with the Filipino, Indonesian and Malay as the peripheral.
Transfer of communicative strategy has proven another source of research interests. Earlier attempts at transfer as strategy was documented in Varadi (1973) who showed that learners transferred NL-based strategies to adjust messages in the TL. Taylor (1975) evidenced that much of the learner’s overgeneralization had to do with their transferred communicative strategies. Tarone (1977) also noticed the learner’s conscious use of NL-based communicative strategies. Bialystok & Frohlich (1980) showed when the learners had difficulties in oral lexical expressions, they turned to transfer NL communicative strategies. Varadi (1980) reported that one apparent strategy in TL communication is message adjusting. Stanlaw (1982) provided examples of NL-based communicative strategies by Japanese learners. Besides, Faerch & Kasper (1983) discussed how the Danish students relied on their NL for accomplishing an utterance. When encountering a new word in speech, the Danish learner of English would use a Danish word in that sentence or use Danish to express the meaning of a new word to put his meaning across. Corrales & Call (1989) further evidenced that learners would rely on the use of communicative strategies to convey lexical meaning when they were at a loss of what they wanted to say. All this led to House & Blum-Kulka’s (1986) and Bialystok’s (1990a) book-length discussions of communicative strategy transfer. Communicative strategy was also evidenced in Nsakala’s (1994) investigation of transfer from the angle of code mixing. He reported that code mixing comes from an unbalanced requirement of foreign language competence and communicative prerequisites. He argued that code mixing is not a norm to be recommended in EFL teaching for two reasons: it hinders comprehension and slows the speed of TL acquisition. Kasper (1995) added that the learners both shifted their previous knowledge about politeness principles and communicative strategies into the comprehension and production of the TL.
Endeavor has also been given to account for transfer from the pragmatic perspective. Earlier treatments were to look at how non-native speakers interpret and produce the speech act of “request” (Scarcella, 1979; Walters, 1979; Carrell, 1979). Kasper (1981) made a book-length treatment of the issue.
As was mentioned in Section 1.1, transfer to pragmaticians means difference of use due to NL influence. And to understand what is different, a preliminary step was to sort out similarities and differences between languages and the use of these languages. The effort to study how non-native speakers understand and realize a speech act in the TL has spiraled into a tradition identified as the study of pragmatic universals. As many as 11 speech acts have been covered to date: requests, suggestions, invitations, refusals, expressions of disagreement, corrections, complaints, apologies, expression of gratitude, compliments and indirect answers (Kasper, 1992).
By comparing how people in different languages and cultures realized a speech act, we are now rested on a ground that enables us to tell in what way people share something in common in making a request, and to sort out a positive transfer from a negative one. Take “request” for example. In realizing such a speech act, people in most languages tend to use either a directive statement, and in putting forth a conventional indirect speech act, linguistic hints such as “Would you mind V-ing?” for a request from others were used (Kasper, 1992). In general, people from different cultures fall back on their knowledge on how to make a request (Weinert, 1995). 2.3 Native speakers’ attitudes toward transfer
Earlier accounts of the learner language and native speakers’ attitude include Bansal (1966) and Tiffen (1974). They looked into the intelligibility of native speakers. One of the earliest to consider the effect of transfer, James (1974) considered the gravity of errors due to NL-based transfer. In this early documented report, he developed a set of measures to gauge learners’ error in terms of severity to TL linguistic rules. Politzer (1978) specifically looked into how native speakers viewed the learners’ transfer-related errors. He examined how the German native speakers perceived those errors made by English learners of German. Nelson (1982) and Hultfors (1986) further explored intelligibility in more details. Hultfors studied how the British looked at the Norwegian learners’ errors in English and discovered that acceptability rate of transfer-related errors were often subject to intelligibility. Besides, a foreigner role showed an obvious difference in the attitude on the learners’ errors.
After the early 80s, communicative effect studies were extended to cover interlanguage features such as conversational styles, the use of contexualization cues, politeness, and indirectness in cross-cultural settings.
Investigations from interactional sociolinguistic perspective (Erickson & Shultz, 1982; Gumperz, 1982; Scollon & Scollon, 1983; Tannen, 1985) revealed that intercultural miscommunication could be a result from incompatible conversational styles. At the same time, these analyses showed that there were unsuccessful uptake or breakdown in the light of differences in the use of contexualization cues, politeness, and indirectness. However, Erickson (1975) demonstrated that ethnic differences in gate-keeping conversations could be neutralized through building up common ground, or co-membership, based on shared interests or experience. Tannen (1985) cited evidences of misunderstandings of contextualized cues which resulted in favorable attributions to the interlocutor, and for conversational styles which, although different, were complementary rather than conflicting, allowing both participants to reach their goals and feel comfortable about their interaction. Nihalani (1988) looked into the standard for judging non-native speakers’ pronunciation and proposed that we should find a norm for non-native speakers.
Another main aspect tackled in communicative effect studies is pragmatic failure. Thomas (1983) noticed that in cross-cultural communication, learners expressed their ideas in a way that was different from the native speakers. This interlanguage phenomenon, free of grammatical errors, sometimes led to miscomprehension in cross-cultural communication. Approached closer, a pragmatic failure was sometimes related to the misuse of a learned linguistic form and sometimes it was associated with NL-based influence. She divided pragmatic failures into two types, pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic, both terms being indebted to the discussion of the scope of general pragmatics in The Principle of Pragmatics (Leech, 1983).
An example of pragmalinguistic failure is Chinese learner’s use of the expression “Never mind” in replying to “Thanks a lot. That’s a great help” (He, 1988). In Chinese, we use “没关系”(Mei guan xi) or “不用谢”(Bu yong xie) in reply to “Thank you”. However, their equivalents in English, “Never mind”, “Not at all” and “You are welcome” are slightly different in use from one another, though they all may be translated as “没关系”(Mei guan xi) in Chinese. The students often failed to see the discrepancy and, due to their mother-tongue influence, used these expressions interchangeably.
A sociopragmatic failure may sometimes be resulted from a Chinese-based influence. For instance, our learners sometimes fall back on their Chinese ways in interpreting an intended meaning in an utterance or in observing the rules, factors in a social situation of the TL. If a student helped the professor clean the chalkboard, he would normally say “thank you” to the student. But instead of saying “My pleasure”, as native speakers normally do in this situation, Chinese students would often say, “It’s my duty”. This shows the students’ falling back on the Chinese situation where it is wholesomely all right for people to say “应该的”(Ying gai de). But he failed to realize that in English ‘It is my duty” also implies an obligation instead of a volunteer help.
Enlightened by Thomas’s concepts of pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure, Kontra (1993) analyzed the breakdowns in communication of Standard Hungarians and American Hungarians.
Reports revealed that in terms of the communicative effect, transfers were of two categories, positive and negative. Those transfers from the learner’s NL that do not lead to misunderstanding in the TL are positive. Negative pragmatic transfer is different, as it was evidenced that some of the transfer-based pragmatic failures are serious (Thomas, 1983). Thus negative pragmatic transfer is more complicated and requires further investigation (Kasper, 1992; 1995).
It is impossible to discuss transfer without mentioning the target norm for contrast, either at the identification stage or evaluation stage of a transfer. Kachru (1982) made earlier discussions about norm and effect relationship. To Kachru, deviations occurred not only at the level of forms but also at the level of meaning. The norm issue was further discussed from the teaching point of view by Alim El-Sayed (1987), Svanes (1988), Larry-Smith (1988), and Awonusi (1990).
A realistic problem is that under strictly comparable task conditions, native speakers often use different standard varieties of English, such as American English (AmE), Australian English (AustrE), and British English (BrE). These different standard varieties display preferences in their selection of semantic formulae in, for example, ‘apologizing’, though some of the variation may be due to context effects (Bergman & Kasper, 1993). What is more, these standard varieties possess their different regional varieties. For instance, in standard varieties of American English, different regional varieties have been identified to demonstrate different selection patterns of request strategies (Michaelis, 1992). An early work by Tannen (1981), for example, on different preferences in conversational styles by east coat and west coast Americans, already displayed variation in speech act performance in culturally motivated dialogs. Beebe (1985) thus argued that learner-internal factors such as feelings and motivations, and external factors such as social and situational factors would influence model preferences. Researchers had to know what such model preferences were. But it is difficult to have access to the pertinent varieties in order to select a relevant target variety as the L2 baseline.
Generally, investigators were advised to choose any of the above norms, or ‘choosing the right stuff’, for the intended goal as an L2 norm in interlanguage pragmatics (Kasper, 1992).
