If-conditionals in EFL Learners' Spoken Interlanguage: A Discourse-pragmatic Perspective

[[abstract]]This study investigates the use of English if-conditionals in 18 Taiwanese EFL learners’ spoken interlanguage. By means of a qualitative analysis, the research focus on (1) error analysis in the form-construction of if-conditionals, (2) exploration of the discourse-pragmatic functions of if-conditionals, and (3) possible reasons for the learners’ performance. The natural spoken data produced by the participants within 3 situated conversation topics – Lottery, Winter/Summer Vacation and the 921 Earthquake – spell out several intriguing findings and implications. First of all, counterfactuals are rendered more difficult than open if-conditionals for the learners to produce. The general tendency of error types is argued to be attributed to the inconsistency of hypotheticality level/epistemic stance between the protasis and the apodosis of an if-conditional. Such deficiency suggests that the learners are unaware of the mapping between the forms of if-conditionals and hypotheticality/epistemic stance. Furthermore, the learners’ strategies to avoid if-conditionals, such as simplifying the syntactic structure or substituting with other structures or lexicon, are observed to indirectly reflect the difficulty of if-conditionals in the development of EFL learners’ interlanguage. As for the discourse-pragmatic functions, the results display three types in the learners’ if-conditionals– assuming, contrasting, and exploring of options. These are roughly compatible to English native speakers’ use of if-conditionals. Yet, the findings indicate no if-conditionals for interactional use such as mitigation, which is supposed to be commonly-used in communication. This can be attributed to the confinement of the assigned conversation topics, the input received by the learners, or the learners’ unfamiliarity with interactional talks in L2. With regard to possible influences on the learners’ performance, the first one is L1 (i.e. Chinese) transfer. The learners’ deficiency in the form-construction of if-conditionals is correlated to the morphosyntactic differences in L1 and L2. In contrast, their ability to perform appropriate discourse-pragmatic functions conforms to the similarities shared by Chinese and English conditionals. Second, an analysis of the if-conditionals in a senior-high school textbook reveals insufficient input of counterfactuals students have received but the textbook does provide varieties of discourse-pragmatic functions. This is reflected in the learners’ output except that there are many if-conditionals for interactional use in the textbook but none in the spoken data. This implies the defect of the current EFL pedagogy. In view of these observations, the study suggests some teaching guidelines and activities for EFL teachers to teach the use of if-conditionals effectively.