A Multimodal Study On Direct Complaints Of Chinese EFL Learners

Pragmatic competence refers to the ability of perceiving and producing speech acts appropriately,which plays an essential role in daily communication.Complaint is a common speech act,appropriate expression of which can be regarded as one of the important manifestations of pragmatic competence.Communication entails joint works of different modes.However,most previous studies spotlighted the investigation of verbal language,potentially leading to a biased understanding of pragmatic competence.Therefore,the application of multimodal discourse analysis to the study of speech acts of complaints not only expands the perspective of pragmatics research,but also further explores the roles of verbal language and other modes in the process of discourse construction.The present study adopted multimodal discourse analysis to examine the pragmatic competence of 18 Chinese EFL learners.In this study,data were collected through role-play tasks of 2 Chinese complaints scenarios and 2 English complaints scenarios followed with interviews.This study analyzed multimodal characteristics of direct complaints from 18 English majors in terms of spoken language,paralanguage,and nonverbal behavior,to investigate how language use and social distance impact on the output of complaints,and to explore how each mode performs,in different moves of complaints,to construct complaints.The results show that: 1)learners’ choices of complaints strategies were influenced by the use of language.The learners tended to choose more direct and rapid complaint strategies in the Chinese scenarios than those in the English scenarios.Whereas,the English complaints underwent a process from implicit to explicit.The nonverbal behaviors of the learners in the English scenarios were more abundant than those in the Chinese scenarios,which were mainly reflected in the adoption of metaphorics,deictics,and beats;2)social distance hardly exerted influences on the learners’ choice of complaint strategies,but affected the learners’ performances of other modes,such as gestures and head movements.Compared with talking with strangers,the complainers were inclined to employ more fruitful resources of gestures and head movements when communicating with acquaintances;3)the modal intensity of the learners was affected by the use of language,social distance,and the move of complaints.The modal complexity of the learners was strongly impacted by the move of complaints.In the process of complaints,the complainers carried out paralanguage and nonverbal behaviors such as speed,gesture,facial expression,head movement and other resources to complement and strengthen the meaning transmission and emotional expression.This study connects multimodal discourse analysis with the study of complaints and explores the research topic of pragmatics from a new perspective,which aims to dig out the function of language and other modes during the process of discourse meaning construction.