Investigating the negative impact of pragmatic transfer on the acquisition of English pragmatic as perceived by L2 Learners: A review

Pragmatics is a basic and vital part of dialect capacity all together for L2 learners to comprehend and be comprehended in their communications with native speakers (NSs). This study aims to identify pragmatics and pragmatic transfer, and to make an overview about the relation between pragmatic transfer and language acquisition. One of the main results that are demonstrated from this study is that there are several observed factors that play a significant role in the pragmatics competency such as; grammatical competence, input factors and instructions. The study results also indicated that the negative pragmatic transfer occurs usually when the L2 learners erroneously generalized to L2 context from pragmatic knowledge of Ll. Negative transfer may prompt miscommunication but not always. This sort of transfer is called negative, not as a result of its negative impact on the success of communication, but since it includes an unjustified generalization from pragmatic knowledge of L1 to a communicative circumstance in L2. The study recommended for more investigations into this topic and specially, in non-basic viewpoints, including negative pragmatic transfer.   Key words: Pragmatics, pragmatic transfer, L2 learners.