A Pragmatic Research On Requests Of Chinese English Majors

Many studies have shown that learners'pragmatic competence is crucial in their communication with the native speakers. Acquiring pragmatic competence is one of the important goals of language teaching. So we will make some investigation for pragmatic competence of Chinese English Majors (CEM) through the speech act of request which is widely used in a variety of situations of our daily life.The realization patterns of the speech act of request have shown differences in the different languages. The primary goal of the present research is to investigate the deviation of request strategies employed by CEM. The second is to analyze what is the possible reason that may cause this deviation. The last is to find out some implications to the English teaching. And five research questions are raised: 1) How are the Chinese English Majors in performing requests now? 2) Are there any differences or similarities between Chinese English Majors and English native speakers in performing a request? 3) If there are some differences or similarities, which are more obvious? 4) What is the possible cause of the differences? 5) Are there any implications to English teaching?In the speech act of request, there are three main forms:interrogatives, declaratives, imperatives. On the research of the request strategies, in the CCSARP project, Blum-Kulka and House compile the nine distinctions into three levels in their analysis. They are the direct strategy, the conventionally indirect strategy and the non-conventionally indirect strategy. In the questionnaire of this research an opting out strategy is added. That is to say, the subjects can choose "make no request" when they feel there's no need to make a request in some situations.The research about CEM performing the speech act of request provides data of three groups of subjects (CNS, ENS and CEM) through discourse completion test (DCT) questionnaires with twelve request situations in it. Then the collected data are analyzed from the following perspectives:request forms; request modifications and request strategies relating to such parameters as social distance, dominance and gender.The results from the analysis show there are both similarities and differences, but differences are more obvious. Also, we get some important characteristics of the CEM's request behavior by comparative research as follow:1) CEM is more polite and humble than the ENS in the present research; 2) CEM has the habit of using a topic-prominent discourse, where they like to put their request at the end of some reasons; 3) CEM prefers the hint strategy. The findings indicate this research provides CEM with the implication in request competence. Language learners'perception and use of request in different situations may much help for their realization of the speech act of request. The present research is an attempt in CEM's request pragmatic competence research. To some extent, it may promote CEM's request competence and offer some new theoretical insights in the Second Language Acquisition. And the end of the thesis points out that, in English teaching nowadays, the teacher's main target should be teaching the students how to express themselves in the exact ways in the communications but not only to teach students to make correct sentences in speaking and writing.