The pragmatics transfer of javanese politeness norms to the english production performed by english literature students of Uinsa

This paper aims to investigate pragmatic transfer in the context of making a request. The participants were 181 UIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya English Department students from the second to the sixth semester. Two research questions have been solved in this study, namely: (1) How does the pragmatic transfer occur in the process of communicating with the lecturer in making a request and (2) How does the pragmatic transfer occur in the process of communicating with the peer in making a request. Data for this study were elicited from the participants using the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) with six prompts consisting of 3 situations of requesting the lecturer and three situations of requesting the peer. This study used a descriptive qualitative method to interpret the data. The data were analyzed using the theory of pragmatic transfer proposed by Kasper (1992) and observed through sociopragmatics and pragmalinguistics factors that influenced the speech. Native norms of the participants were also employed to see the sociopragmatics factors, whereas native language structure patterns were considered to identify the pragmalinguistics. The analysis continued by examining the speech to see whether it resulted in a negative or positive transfer. The findings of this study revealed that students tend to use indirect requests to the lecturer and mostly perform negative transfer influenced by sociopragmatics factors because of the differences in social power. The behavior shown by the students is purposed to achieve politeness in the academic context. Meanwhile, the communication with peers showed almost the same strategies as the lecturer; however, the request is uttered more direct with fewer mistakes.