An Intercultural And Cross-Gender Study On Disagreement Realization Patterns Of Chinese And American College Students

In the 20th century, with the rapid development of modern communication technology and transportation, more and more intercultural communication takes place. According to M. McLuhan (He Daokuan, 2000:7), with the development of the media, the whole world has become a"global village", but, this is not the same as the disappearance of cultural differences. In fact, in intercultural communication, all of the interlocutors always have confusion, conflict, and some other problems. In his book, The Silent Language, Edward Hall (Liu Jianrong, 1991:3) argued that"the difficulties that we meet when we communicate with foreigners are mainly caused by our poverty in the knowledge about intercultural communication". He also pointed out that, in intercultural communication, understanding the other country?s culture is as important as learning how to speak the language. Obviously, the most difficult issue in intercultural communication is cultural obstacles. In the communication process, the interlocutors achieve the goal of communication through speech acts. People from different cultural backgrounds have differences, more or less, in their ways of performing speech acts. These ?differences? may cause the failure in communication.Disagreement is one of the thirty-one speech acts which Jia Yuxin (1997) defines as ?essential ones?. According to the definition of the Face Theory and Politeness Principles, disagreement is a typical speech act that will hurt the listener?s positive face (Lorcher, 2004). To have an intercultural study of disagreement from sociological and pragmatic aspects can help the interlocutors promote their communication efficiency.The systematical studies about language and gender began from the 1960s. In the past, lots of great and meaningful achievements have been gained. These achievements are about vocabulary, phonology, conversation style, second language learning, and so on. Relatively speaking, the research of speech act is a new aspect in this field.In the present study, under the help of some pragmatic principles, the author has probed into disagreement realization patterns in Chinese and American college students. DCT (discourse completion test) and face-to-face interview were used as research methods in this study. DCT was used as a tool to collect data; the interview was used to figure out the subjects? attitudes about disagreement. Altogether, 110 subjects participated in this study (55 Chinese and 55 Americans), and all of them are college students. Fifty Chinese (twenty-five males and twenty-five females) subjects answered the DCT questionnaires, and the other five subjects (three males and two females) took part in the interview. Fifty Americans (twenty-six males and twenty-four females) subjects answered the DCT questionnaires, and the other five subjects (two females and three males) took part in the interview. Through the interview, the author found that, no matter Chinese or Americans, all of the subjects said that they would think about many factors (status, relationship, importance, etc.) before they showed their disagreement. And, sometimes, they had reservations. Through detailed study and analysis of the data, the following conclusion has been drawn. Firstly, when college students perform the speech act of disagreement, the direct disagreement pattern is the dispreferred way in both cultures. Secondly, American college students use more direct expressions than Chinese students. Thirdly, power and social distance play as important variables in Chinese students? choices of expressions, but for American college students, it?s not so important. Fourthly, seeing from the gender aspect, no matter under what cultural background, males use more direct expressions than females.The thesis contains six chapters. Chapter One gives an introduction of this study, in which the general description of the study, and its significance are presented. Chapter Two serves as the literature review. Chapter Three introduces the theoretical foundation of the present study. In Chapter Four, the methodology is put forward, which introduces the subjects, the instruments, and the data collection and the methods for data analysis. The research results are reported in Chapter Five. Chapter Six is the conclusion, which presents the major findings of the study, followed by the pedagogical implications, limitations of the present study as well as some suggestions for future study.