A Study On English Compliment Responses Used By Chinese And Japanese EFL Learners

Compliments,as a common and positive speech act,are universally used in thanks,apologies,greetings,etc.Proper compliment responses can shorten social distances of interlocutors,help contact efficiently and maintain harmonious personal relationships.Due to various perceptions and interpretations of appropriateness and politeness among different cultures or languages,however,pragmatic failures often occur in cross-cultural communications,which will probably lead to communication breakdowns.Therefore,it is quite critical for EFL learners and native learners to study the differences of pragmatic features of certain speech acts.Compliments,an indispensable and meaningful part in pragmatics,receive much emphasis of research.However,compliment responses,which is closely bound up with compliments,have not been paid attention to for a long time.Moreover,most of the current researches focus on the differences between EFL learners and native English speakers,the contrastive studies are numbered on the language differences of different groups who are studying English as a foreign language but come from different language backgrounds.Based on speech act theory and politeness principle,this study makes a quantitative and qualitative study on English learners with different native languages.A total of 136 college students majoring in English(102 from China and 34 from Japan)are invited to take part in this study.The data are collected through Written Discourse Completion Task(WDCT)with six hypothetical scenarios regarding the three major topics of appearance,performance and personality.The similarities and differences of the compliment response strategies in each group are compared and analyzed by the way of Chi-square.Furthermore,individual interviews are also carried out.According to the research results,the CR strategies adopted by EFL learners in the two groups show apparent difference.The study compares the pragmatic competence of EFL learners from two different countries and throws new light on pragmatics learning in an EFL setting.It is designated to help EFL learnersacross cultures in learning English and expected that such research will be of certain significance in future studies in the field.