An Empirical Study Of Chinese EFL Learners' Compliment Responses From The Perspective Of Cultural Transfer

This thesis examines the compliment responses made by Chinese EFL learners from the perspective of cultural transfer. Compliments serve as "social lubricants", since they are usually positive evaluations of the co-participant of the conversation. However, compliment responses by people from different cultural backgrounds can be quite different: compared with the commonly employed acceptance strategy of the westerners, Chinese are usually found to depreciate the compliments, which is deemed as extremely impolite according to the various western politeness theories.By making use of a Discourse Completion Test as the data elicitation method, the author investigates three different groups of subjects: juniors of English Major, freshmen of non-English major and English native speakers. The first two groups are designed to represent Chinese EFL learners with different language proficiencies. The purpose of the present study is to find the frequencies and distributions of compliment strategies employed by Chinese EFL learners and English native speakers, and whether the Chinese EFL learners transfer their cultural norms to the target language communication. After data analysis, the author concludes that the Chinese EFL learners more frequently employed the nonagreement strategy no matter it is in the context of Chinese or English. This is due to the contrasting cultural differences between China and the west: to show politeness, the Chinese tend to disagree or depreciate a compliment, since modesty is highly respected in the Chinese culture. Statistical test does not indicate any significant difference between the performances of Chinese EFL learners with higher and lower levels language proficiency: even proficient EFL learners transfer their native cultural norms to the English communications. This indicates when the learners' native cultural norms are quite different from that of the target language, they would probably commit negative cultural transfers, since it is the psychological culture at the deep layer that continues to guide people's thoughts and behaviors. The findings and discussions of the thesis may shed some light on the improvement of cross-cultural communication.