Negative pragmatic transfer: the case of advice

Negative pragmatic transfer is often regarded as one of the causes of intercultural misunderstanding. The present study aims to investigate cases of negative pragmatic transfer in advice-giving. Thirty EFL students whose mother tongue was Romanian completed a Discourse Completion Test containing six situations which required advice-giving. The results showed that EFL learners tend to transfer the cultural norms of speaking from their mother tongue into English. Since this is highly likely to lead to breakdowns in communication, more attention should be paid to developing EFL learners’ pragmatic competence.