A Study Of Disagreement By Chinese EFL Learners From The Theoretical Perspective Of Interactional Pragmatics

The present study investigates the realization patterns of disagreement by Chinese EFL learners in multi-party discussions from an interactional pragmatic perspective.Drawing upon the frame-based approach to politeness(Terkourafi,2001,2005)and conversation analysis(Schegloff,2006),this study attempts to construct a theoretical framework of interactional pragmatics,and to study speech acts in a given context performed through interactional and pragmatic resources.The framework is composed of three dimensions,that is,turn management,pragmatic strategies and topic development.Turn management refers to the turn-constructional features of an act employed by interactants,and these features are summarized as its degree of directness.Pragmatic strategies refer to the strategies employed in an act by interactants for self-representation,realized specifically through pragmatic force modifiers(PFMs,Nikula,1996).Topic development refers to the turn-organizational features of an act,exhibited mainly by its sequence structure.Based upon the above theoretical construct,this study attempts to analyze the interactional and pragmatic features of disagreement by Chinese EFL learners in multi-party discussions,and these features are then compared with those by native English speakers in order to explore Chinese EFL learners' interactional pragmatic competence and provide implications for second language learning and teaching.Specifically,this study addresses the following three research questions:(1)What are the features of the degree of directness in disagreement by Chinese EFL learners?(2)What are the features of the pragmatic force modifiers in disagreement by Chinese EFL learners?(3)What are the features of the sequence structure in disagreement by Chinese EFL learners?These three research questions are complementary to one another as they provide both turn-constructional and turn-organizational levels of analysis of a discursive act.A corpus approach and a conversation analytic method are adopted,and the data are analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively.Chinese EFL learner data were drawn from Multi-party Discussion Corpus collected in a foreign language university.Participants were third year English-major students conveniently sampled.The size of the corpus amounts to 107,542 tokens in total.Native speaker data were drawn from TV discussions in British National Corpus,with a total of 44,215 tokens.In accordance with the theoretical construct,the newly-designed coding systems and coding tools,the results were then analyzed statistically and conversationally.The study finds that the disagreement patterns by Chinese EFL learners in multi-party discussions exhibit significant difference from their native counterparts in all of the three dimensions of the act(that is,the degree of directness,the use of pragmatic force modifiers and the sequence structure).More specifically,the study has yielded the following findings:(1)In terms of the degree of directness,these Chinese EFL learners' disagreement was not as direct as that of the native English speakers in general.This indicates that Chinese EFL learners'argumentative frames are not well established as expected.Specifically,first,these Chinese EFL learners used interruptions less frequently,and this suggests that their involvement and enthusiasm are low in arguments.Second,the Chinese EFL learners overused "generic-you",which signals a rather vague person reference to co-participants in arguments and thereby hinders a smooth interaction of ideas.Third,the Chinese EFL learners used less content reference as well,that is,in their disagreements they failed to build appropriate "opposition format",and thus reduced thematic opposition and interpersonal involvement.Fourth,the Chinese EFL learners did not use conventionalization cues,such as look and wait a minute.Finally,the Chinese EFL learners underused auxiliary speech acts in disagreement.In other words,their disagreements,without due elaborations or justifications,were carried out for its own sake,which can be regarded as their inability to defend an opinion.In addition,the Chinese EFL learners' heavy reliance on the discourse marker but to express disagreement was also in sharp contrast to disagreement of different formats by the native speakers.(2)In terms of pragmatic force modifiers,the Chinese EFL learners' disagreement tended to be weakened,as they overused hedges.Further analysis of PFMs'orientational functions reveals that the Chinese EFL learners' hedges were mostly speaker-oriented and content-oriented.This could be seen as the indication for their reservations and uncertainty about their own opinions or positions.Meanwhile,in contrast to the native speakers,the Chinese EFL learners did not use any of the speaker-oriented boosters.This indicates that the Chinese EFL learners lack commitment and authority in their arguments,and thus weaken their arguments' persuasiveness.(3)In terms of the sequence structure,disagreement by the Chinese EFL learners was found to generally exhibit a similar three-move structure to that of the native speakers.However,the extended sequence structure of the learners' disagreement was not adequately constructed,thus the amount of topical development needs to be increased.The analysis of T3 orientation shows that the learners tended to directly support their T1 claim in T3 disagreement,thus working in a“solo versus solo”fashion,with only limited expansion of their interlocutors' contributions,signaling the lack of mutuality.In addition,the Chinese EFL learners,disagreement tended to take the form of a non-adjacently placed sequence due to its inserted sequences,closing down a continuous and immediate interactional space.Moreover,most of these inserted sequences were moves of alignment and negotiation.In this sense,the Chinese EFL learners' disagreement is characterized by collaboration and convergence,as opposed to divergence in the native speakers' disagreement.The findings of this study have important implications for the improvement of Chinese EFL learners' interactional pragmatic competence.First,it is important for language learners to have a contextually-grounded view of language use.Reasonable contradiction is necessary in certain situations.Disagreement can be used to achieve mutual understanding,agreement,and even harmony.Being polite is not sufficient on its own for second language learners.Proffering and holding onto one's disagreement appropriately and effectively is regarded as an ability to develop argumentation and construct social identity.Second,it is essential to raise language learners' pragmatic awareness.For instance,they need to be aware of the importance of establishing a reasonable interpersonal space with opponents,of balancing certainty and uncertainty in arguments,of avoiding using certain interactional and pragmatic strategies repeatedly,etc.