A Pragmatic Study Of Requests By Chinese English Learners

Pragmatic competence, as a concept, has in recent years been widely accepted in language pedagogy. And acquiring pragmatic competence is one of the important goals of language teaching. In the course of English teaching, teachers are supposed to enable the students to use language in communicatively effective and appropriate ways. That is to say, teachers should help students to obtain the pragmatic competence. So it is altogether necessary and worthwhile to investigate language learners' pragmatic competence. So this paper is focused on one of the speech acts - request. Request is chosen mainly because it is widely used in a variety of situations of our daily life. From the studies of requests by scholars, such as Lyons (1977), Searle(1979), Leech(1983), Searle & Vanderveken(1985), Tsui(2000) and our present research, we could arrive at some understanding of requests: requests are attempts on the part of the speaker in discourse to get the hearer to perform or to stop performing some kind of action, meanwhile the addressee is left with the right to refuse to comply.The primary objective of this study is to investigate the deviation of request strategies employed by non-native speakers. The second objective is to examine what is the possible reason that may contribute to this deviation. The last objective of this paper is to find out some implications to the English teaching. Four questions are raised in the study. 1) What are the differences between the Chinese English learner and the native speaker when choosing the request strategy? 2), What are the differences between the Chinese English learner and the native speaker in different social situation when choosing therequest strategy? 3) What is the possible cause of the differences mentioned in question 1 and 2? 4) Are there any implications to English teaching?There are, altogether, three groups of subject participated in this investigation. They are the group of native speakers of English (AM), a group of Chinese learners of English (IL), and a group of native speakers of Chinese (CHN). The group of native speakers of English was American students in Biostatitics Department of Houston University in the United States. They cannot speak Chinese and were not familiar with Chinese culture, totaling 82 with 31 males to 51 females. The Chinese learners of English were undergraduates at English department, Jiangxi Normal University. They consisted of 86 students, with 21 males to 65 females. The native speakers of Chinese, totaling 90 with 42 males to 48 females, were the freshmen at Economics School of Jiangxi Normal University. They were not familiar with American culture. DCT questionnaire includes 6 situations, which were set by the social distance and dominance. The questionnaire are offered as two versions, the English version for AM and IL groups and the Chinese Version for CHN group.By the comparison between the IL group and the AM group we find out that there do exist the differences between Chinese English learners and the English native speakers. Furthermore by the comparison with the CHN group we find out that the differences between the Chinese English learners and the English native speakers are possibly caused by the different culture. Through the analysis of the main perspective difference between the Chinese culture and the western culture we make sure of this finding. That is to say the deviation of using the request strategies with the native ones is mostly be...