Compliment Response Strategies in Interlanguage Pragmatic Development:a Cross-Sectional Study

This paper presents the results of a cross-sectional study of the interlanguage pragmatic (ILP) development across three groups of Chinese learners of English from 3 proficiency levels, aged 14, 17, and 20 respectively. 1707 pieces of responses to compliments (CR) in both Chinese (710 pieces) and English (997 pieces) are collected by using a Discourse Completion Test. After analyzing the data by frequency analysis and chi-square analysis, we find some evidence of ILP development in the English data. As is suggested by the distribution of strategies in Chinese which is significantly different from the English data, there is no pragmatic transfer from Chinese to English.