A Pragmatic Study Of Chinese English Learners' Realization Strategies Of Requests In Letters

The notion of speech act and the speech act theory proposed by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) have made great contributions to the development of pragmatics. Afterwards, pragmatic study of speech acts has been widely developed. Request, as a specific speech act, has been widely studied in the fields of cross-cultural pragmatics and interlanguage. But they are still insufficient for the following reasons: (1). Many researches have demonstrated thai strategies in the realization of request are affected by some social factors such as social distance and degree of imposition. But few researches have been done by dividing request situations into different type according to the factors above. (2). Many researches available employed spoken language but not written one as data, which is not suitable to the quick development of the science of pragmatics.In order to overcome the imperfections above, the present paper chose letter as data and divided request contexts into six types according to social distance and degree of imposition. An investigation was done to one hundred and eighty non-English major sophomores in a Provincial key university, who have studies English for 8 years. Adopting Brown and Levinson's (1978) face-saving theory, and Searle's (1975) indirect speech act theory, the paper analyzed the students' pragmatic failures in their request strategies in letters. The present research reveals that pragmatic failures in request realization strategies in letters are serious, many of which are caused by cultural pragmatic differences between China and English countries. Furthermore, teachers and students have not realized the importance of pragmatic appropriateness in writing. The paper also points out that in the teaching and learning of English writing, pragmatic appropriate use of language should be taken intoconsideration. That is, in the process of helping students to improve their linguistic writing competence, cultural differences, pragmatic differences and communication rules in the target language should also be taught to improve students' writing competence. Finally, this paper has also raised some suggestions to help students improve their pragmatic competence in writing.