A Contrastive Study On Disagreement Strategies Of Chinese And American College Students

The thesis applies Brown and Levinson's face theory to investigate the features of strategies use in expressing disagreement by Chinese EFL learners and American students under different cultural backgrounds. The participants include both 100 Chinese college students and 100 American college students. The data are collected through the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and analyzed by both quantitative and qualitative methods. The author analyzes the frequencies of disagreement strategies, and the influence of the social power and distance on the realization of disagreement.The results show that on the whole, the Chinese college students tend to employ direct strategy from the higher-to-lower status situation, while from lower-to-higher status situation, they prefer the euphemism strategy. To peers, while the American subjects utilize the direct strategy most frequently, the Chinese students tend to exercise indirect strategies rather than the direct strategy in order to show politeness. With the increase of social distance, unlike the American students, the Chinese respondents apply more direct strategies of disagreement in preference to less direct strategies.The findings provide the abundant evidence that the social and cultural factors affect the options of pragmatic strategies for Chinese disagreement. Chinese relations are decided by social power and social distance. With the regard to culture, influenced by the traditional idea, Chinese hold the sense of hierarchy, ideas of politeness and face, which shows clear distinction with the American peers.The present study has some implications for foreign language teaching and learning, during which much emphasis should be put on to improve and develop the students' cultural awareness by applying the appropriate pragmatic strategies so as to avoid cross-cultural pragmatic failure.