A Cross-cultural Study Of The Speech Act Of Compliment: Developing Communicative Competence In A Second Language

The aim of this study is two-fold. One is to widen the scope of cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics by studying the compliment performance of native Chinese speakers and Chinese ESL learners; the other is to widen the scope of L2 acquisition research by contrasting learners in naturalistic environments with those in non-naturalistic environments, therefore to develop ESL learners' communicative competence. The reason why this speech act compliment is chosen as a current research focus was that it is an often-used, yet intricate speech act. More important, it can serve as a very good example of how misunderstandings or even offense in intercultural communication may occur. In this study, to elicit data, a discourse completion questionnaire, the most frequent method for assessing cross-linguistic speech act performance is used in investigating L2 learners' pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence both quantitatively and qualitatively. Subjects' responses were classified into main strategies, and repeated-measures analyses of variance were conducted to identify the pragmatic differences that distinguished the behavior of two Chinese ESL groups, one living in the U.S. and the other in China, from that of American and Chinese speakers .The results and the following discussions show that:1) In general, native Chinese speakers' compliment behavior is indeed different from that of the Americans. Based on this study, there may exist some evidence that lends support to the universality of the convention of means in explicit complimenting. However, we can still easily observe some culture-specific differences in terms of compliment strategies, the use of supportive moves, positive semantic carriers and syntactic patterns. For example, in comparison with native American English speakers, native Chinese speakers gave many fewer compliments in situations where giving compliments could be socially acceptable and appropriate. Still another example, while the former employed adverbs and nouns in explicit compliments more, the latter more frequently used adjectives and verbs.2) The results above reveal that Chinese ESL learners living in the U.S. didappear to better approach the target language norms than the learners in China, which suggests that greater exposure to the target language speakers and greater cultural experience of L2 social conventions may support adult L2 acquisition. For instance, like native English speakers, the U.S. ESL learners were mostly very straightforward so that few supportive moves and/or small talk were employed by them. In contrast, like native Chinese speakers, the Chinese ESL learners much more frequently employed such moves or talk. Still compared with their Chinese counterparts, the U.S. ESL learners produced a percentage of positive semantic carriers very similar to that of the Americans3) The two ESL groups' behavior appears to be related to their LI features in terms of the linguistic options and strategies employed-even if the U.S. learner group's behavior shows greater resemblance to that of the native English group. Cultural norms appear to play a very important part in all these differences. For example, though the U.S. learners appeared to have approached the target language norms in many respects, they used the. "You V (NP) ADV" pattern much more frequently than Americans (12.3% vs. 1.3%). It may suggest that they appropriated speech act strategies from their LI conventions in which adverbs are quite often used to give compliments. However, the L2 learners in China resemble native Chinese speakers more than the learners in the U. S. Accordingly, many researches focusing on other cultures which, like the Chinese, have a different way of thinking from that of the West need to be done.