Investigating L1 pragmatic transfer in suggestions performed by Algerian learners of English as a foreign language

Abstract EN

The present study aims at investigating pragmatic transfer in suggestions realized by Algerian learners of English as a foreign language.

Data were captured from 35 Algerian native speakers of Arabic whose responses provide the mother tongue baseline data, 20 English native speakers whose responses provide the target language baseline data, and 87 Algerian learners of English as a foreign language whose responses provide the interlanguage data.

Data were collected by means of a discourse completion task that includes 10 hypothetical situations.

Results showed that the Algerian learners of English as a foreign language use direct strategies and mitigate their suggestions the most frequently.

Moreover, their performance reveals that their perceptions of appropriateness and politeness in suggestion-making are different from English natives.

Evidence of pragmatic transfer from Arabic to English was also found in their realized suggestions.

In view of the phenomenon of pragmatic transfer revealed in this study, it is recommended that English as a foreign language teachers should incorporate cross-cultural differences in the realization of speech acts in their syllabi so that the pragmatic performance of their learners approaches the target language norms.