Pragmatic Transfer in English Interactions: A Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Study of Torajanese EFL Learners

Pragmatic competence plays a crucial role in enabling English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners to communicate appropriately across diverse sociocultural contexts. However, learners frequently transfer pragmatic norms from their first language and culture into English interactions, resulting in pragmatic transfer that may lead to misunderstanding or communication breakdown. While pragmatic transfer has been extensively investigated in various linguistic and cultural settings, little attention has been given to learners from the Torajanese cultural community of Indonesia, whose distinctive sociocultural values may shape their pragmatic behavior in English communication. This study aims to examine the forms of pragmatic transfer exhibited by Torajanese EFL learners in English interactions and to explore how Torajanese cultural values influence their pragmatic choices. Employing a qualitative cross-cultural pragmatic approach, the study collected data through Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs), role-play interactions, and semi-structured interviews involving undergraduate EFL students from a university in Tana Toraja. The data were analyzed using the frameworks of interlanguage pragmatics and cross-cultural pragmatics to identify both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic transfer. The findings reveal that participants frequently transferred culturally grounded norms of politeness, indirectness, respect for social hierarchy, and communal harmony into English speech acts, particularly in requests, refusals, apologies, and expressions of disagreement. Although these strategies reflected positive cultural values, they occasionally diverged from native English pragmatic conventions and affected communicative appropriateness. The study highlights the importance of integrating culture-sensitive pragmatic instruction into EFL classrooms to foster learners' intercultural communicative competence while preserving their local cultural identity. These findings contribute to the growing body of research on interlanguage pragmatics by providing empirical evidence from the underrepresented Torajanese cultural context.