A Study On The Acquisition Of "Request" And "Refusal" Speech Acts By Intermediate And Advanced Chinese Learners

As a result of the long-standing emphasis on language rather than pragmatics in Chinese language teaching,learners’ pragmatic competence lags behind their linguistic ability,making it difficult for them to communicate naturally and appropriately in the target language even at advanced levels.This lack of pragmatic competence is often reflected in the pragmatic errors made by learners when performing speech acts.In this study,we take ’request’ and ’refusal’ speech acts as examples to identify common patterns in the performance of target speech acts by native speakers and to analyze the acquisition of speech acts by learners.In this study,we collected common "request" and "refusal" situations in daily life from native speakers through micro-interviews,and after filtering them,we designed the Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Tasks（MDCT）and Written Discourse Completion Tasks（WDCT）questionnaires,which were distributed to native Chinese speakers and intermediate and advanced Chinese learners.By analyzing the questionnaires collected from the native speakers,the study summarized the common patterns in the implementation of target speech acts by native Chinese speakers at three levels:"function","strategy" and "language form".The questionnaires were used as a reference for objective question scoring and subjective question analysis to analyze the understanding and expression of target speech acts of intermediate and advanced Chinese learners.To address the problems of learners in performing the target speech act,this paper makes attributions in terms of language level,cultural background,transfer and generalization of language rules,and compares the collected learner segments with the summarized common patterns of native speakers to further analyze the patterns and difficulties of learners in acquiring the speech acts.It was found that intermediate and advanced Chinese learners have a certain level of pragmatic awareness and pragmatic expression,which is related to the common rules of pragmatics and to the learners’ degree of language learning.The differences between intermediate and advanced Chinese learners and native speakers in the understanding and expression of target speech behaviors are reflected in the three levels of "function","strategy" and "language form".For example,the differences between learners and native speakers in the use of appellatives are mainly in the standardization,appropriateness and variety of appellatives.In addition,the paper also summarizes the difficulties in acquiring the target speech acts,such as "the use of core functional sentences in special situations","non-standard appellations","non-standard greetings",and "indirect strategies"."and the use of "probing" and "compensatory measures" in indirect strategies.This study has certain significance for the practice of Chinese language teaching:firstly,the questionnaire scenarios of this study were collected from interviews with native speakers of different identities,which are representative;secondly,by analyzing the questionnaires collected from native speakers,this study summarizes the pragmatic characteristics of native speakers in performing these two speech acts,which can provide a certain reference basis for Chinese language teaching;finally,this study compares Finally,this study analyzes the questionnaire data and pragmatic features of intermediate and advanced Chinese learners and native speakers,analyzes the common problems and acquisition difficulties of learners in implementing the target speech acts,and systematically summarizes the important and difficult points in teaching speech acts,which are of certain reference significance for Chinese pragmatics teaching and the development of teaching materials.