Issues in second language teaching: Pragmatics and discourse analysis in teaching Chinese as a second language

The cross-cultural study of a speech act, refusal, is used to examine the interaction of cultural knowledge and linguistic skills in language use. Two research methods, Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and Oral Role-play (ORP) are employed.; The DCT study used a sixteen-item questionnaire, which covers such social factors as social status, social distance and elicitation types. Fifty native speakers of Mandarin Chinese, thirty native speakers of American English and thirty Chinese learners completed the questionnaire. The responses of the three language groups were coded and statistically analyzed.; The DCT data identified thirteen refusal strategies. The differences among the three groups were found in the frequency with which different strategies were employed. Among the thirteen strategies, there are six major refusal strategies. They are explanation, alternative, direct refusal, regret, dissuasion and avoidance. DCT data also found significant differences in the selection of these refusal strategies when facing different social factors among the three groups. The general patterns are that Chinese and Americans are at two different ends, and differ in the use of most of the major strategies under varied circumstances. Learners are in the middle of the two native groups.; The Oral role-play data (ORP) are employed to supplement the DCT data and seek to identify strategies which cannot be found in the written form of DCT data and also allow comparison of ORP with DCT data. ORP confirmed the DCT findings that the six strategies are the major refusal strategies. Three new strategies were identified in ORP, repetition, silence and unfinished utterance. They all take oral form and cannot be recorded in written DCT. Comparing the six major strategies, they are all less commonly used strategies. The findings of ORP confirmed that when Chinese face different social relationships, they tend to use different refusal strategies. Generally speaking, ORP data proved the validity of the DCT study.; Competent second language learners need to learn the cultural patterns in addition to language structures so that they can use the target language appropriately. Findings in this study can be used in second language instruction and woven into curriculum design.