The book reports an important investigation into pragmatic transfer in a popular global communicative context, email. The pragmalinguistic and sociolinguistic explorations of request and refusal contributes to our knowledge of pragmatic transfer in L2 pragmatics. The findings of this study would also have pedagogical applications, for example, the teaching and learning of L2 pragmatics. It is highly recommended.

- Chengbo Liu, Donghua University, China, in Discourse Studies 23(3), 2019,

Li’s book shows us that acquiring pragmatic competence is a big, yet underestimated, task in second language acquisition. She provides a wide variety of examples showing how Chinese EFL learners will translate their own cultural norms into the target language, how this may lead to intercultural misunderstandings and how L2 development is influencing this process. These insights will be invaluable to researchers in interlanguage pragmatics, intercultural communication and second language acquisition. Its contrastive approach to the acquisition of pragmatic competence also makes it appealing to anyone interested in Chinese-English contrasts in speech act realisation strategies concerning requests and refusals. In particular, EFL/ESL teachers of Chinese students in China will profit from the author’s practice-oriented recommendations as they try to create more pragmatic awareness in the classroom.

- Christina Dawson, Zhejiang University, in Contrastive Pragmatics 1 (2020),