Study Of The Similarities And Differences Between Chinese And American Students In Taking Strategies For Apologies

This research on speech act of apology, which is based on the "Speech Act Theory", "Politeness Principle" and "Face Theory", is a part of "study of communication rules and different speech act in different culture", which cannot be ignored. Apology is not only a kind of universal and complicated language phenomenon, but also an important communicative interaction. Like statement, request, comfort, praise and greeting, apology is also one of the speech acts, which uses language as means and uses sentence as information carrier during communication. The realization of these acts may bring some consequences to the offended. That is illiberal if we simply consider "apology" as "sorry" "excuse me" The speech act of apology is first studied by Olshtain and Cohen, who defines apology as "a culture-sensitive speech act set of semantic formulae or strategies". J. Holmes puts forward a broad definition of apology that takes its function as the social criterion:An apology is a speech act addressed to B's face-needs and intended to remedy an offense for which A takes responsibility, and thus to restore equilibrium between A and B (where A is the apologizer, and B is the person offended). And Fraser points that "to apologize is to do two things:first, the offender acknowledges responsibility for having performed some act; second, the offender conveys regret for the offense which comes about as a result of the commission of the act. That is to say an apology may be said to do both things."Generally speaking, there are various ways of apology under different cultural backgrounds, which are called "apology strategies". When the interpersonal conflict occurs, an apology in a politic way is a smart move to save the connections with other people. For this reason, during the learning process, it is greatly significant to emphasize study on apology strategies. "Apology strategies" plays a crucial role in "apology". In language research history, different learners hold different views of classifications towards apology strategies. At present, this thesis claims that Fraser is the first scholar who classifies the apology strategies. He distinguishes both direct and indirect strategies in apologizing in 1981. After that, Olshtain and Cohen classify the apology strategies into five patterns. These five apology strategies have been widely adopted in the later research and almost become the template of "apology strategies". However, along with the further development of this research, it is obvious that these five strategies are not enough to meet the need of daily communication. Therefore, Olshtain and Cohen have modified the strategies in 1983; afterwards, based on which, there are many scholars improve and innovate the apology strategies continually. According to the apology strategies research of Fraser. Olshtain and Cohen, this thesis can summarize the previous strategies and adopt a new model with seven strategies:1. IFID (Illocutionary Force Indicating Device)2. Explanation or Account3. Taking on Responsibility4. Strategy of offering repair5. Promise of forbearance6. Showing concern7. Minimizing the degree of offenceIn order to comprehend the apology strategies selection between Chinese and American students, the data in this research are collected by a written questionnaire and Discourse Completion Test (DCT for short). The DCT is advanced by Blum-Kulka to collect data for comparing the speech act realization between the native and nonnative speakers. This DCT method is regarded as the most effective method to collect data about certain speech act, and it is widely used in sociolinguistics and pragmatics. In order to achieve comprehensiveness, the nine situations in the questionnaires contain various relationships, such as:relationship among strangers, classmates, friends, colleagues, net friends, and relationship between professors and students, parents and children. For the comparison between Chinese and Americans, the questionnaires are written in both Chinese version and English version. The questionnaires are distributed in Jilin University in China and Providence University in the US. Of the 120 questionnaires distributed in Jilin University,116 of them are regained and 16 invalid. About the American subjects,53 American students are willing to take part in the investigation, and 31 valid questionnaires are retrieved. So altogether,131 valid questionnaires collect the corpus of this research, which will be analyzed by the using of SPSS.This thesis aims at finding out the differences in using apology strategies between Chinese subjects and American subjects. And we try to research how Chinese and American apologize in such situations (designed in the questionnairs) to acquire the similarities and differences in apology strategies between them. After analyse the data collected by questionnaire, the author hammered out the following questions:Question 1:What kinds of apology strategies do the Chinese and American offenders often use?Question 2:What are the differences in apology strategies choosing between Chinese and Americans offenders?Question 3:Whar are the similarities in using apology strategies between Chinese and Americans offenders?The study indicates that, in the nine situations, both Chinese and American subjects employ all the seven apology strategies for apology. And the IFIDs strategy is the commonest one both in Chinese (38%) and American (44%) data. The strategies "explanation or account" "offer of repair" and "minimizing the degree of offence" features are almost the same as well. This shows that although in the different cultural background, the social functions of apology are sitll the same. That is. to save the offended's face: to make the damaged interpersonal relationship between the offender and the offended harmonious; to get a good communicative purpose and to show concern to the offended, both the Chinese and American subjects will take an apology. Meanwile, just because the different cultural backgrounds, the seclection of apology strategies are different as well. The study also finds, although both the Chinese subjects and the American subjects often use IFIDs strategy when the damage happened, under different situations the methods they use are different. In addition, the "showing concern" strategy is more frequently used among the American subjects. In Chinese data, actually, none of Chinese subject chooses this strategy only. They combine "showing concern" with other strategies. The biggest difference between Chinese and Americans is:the Chinese subjects prefer to use more than one apology strategy when the offense happened. Besides.77.1% of the subjects use more than one strategy, and with the considerable proportion of them, namely 44.4%, prefer to combine two strategies together. But American subjects choose only one apology strategy overwhelmingly higher than others.After analyzing the data in the thesis, the results show that there are not only the similarities but also some obvious differences between Chinese and American students in taking apology strategies. The similarities explain that thoughts and emotions, mode of thinking and way of expressions still have certain identity between the two countries. The differences indicate that under the different culture background, the way of communication and value orientation between Chinese and American students can result in the differences in taking apology strategies.The research tells us that learning a foreign language, besides mastering its vocabulary and grammar, fully understanding the culture, customs, and ways of communication and value orientation of the target language is indispensable. Otherwise, according to this research, no matter how excellent the learners'English standard is. mistakes are hard to avoid during their face-to-face communicating with foreigners. Absolutely speaking, lecture on pragmatic knowledge is still necessary. For EFL teachers, they should change their traditional teaching attitudes. While teaching the students vocabulary and grammar, teachers should always keep in mind all the time to let them gain some knowledge of culture background. If they only put their emphasis on language form teaching without cultural elements, learners cannot learn how to use language appropriately and tactfully in a given context. For EFL learners must realize that learning a language, in fact, is inseparable from learning its culture. Hence, we should make full use of our extracurricular time to learn English and its culture by various means because time for classroom learning is limited.