A Comparative Study Of Apology Strategies Employed By Chinese And American Undergraduates

Linguistic competence plays an important role in successful communication. However, some language learners who have acquired enough linguistic expressions still suffer from communication failure when communicating with native speakers. Therefore, it is important for language learners to improve their communicative competence which requires the learner to learn different norms of speaking apart from the rules of the grammar specific to that language. As culture plays an important role in cross-cultural communication, it is necessary for language learners to cultivate their culture awareness so as to improve cross-culture communicative competence.Speech act is one of the basic tools of the study of communicative competence. Apology is a speech act which happens with a high frequency in our daily lives. A substantial body of empirical studies has been conducted to observe the speech act of apology and to compare the apology strategies employed by different cultures in the last three decades. However, studies of Chinese apology and comparisons of apology between Chinese and other languages are relatively few in China.The present study aims at finding out the differences in apology strategy selection between American and Chinese, male and female undergraduates, so as to point out the importance of the role that culture plays in apology-making. Three research questions are developed to define and clarify the purpose of the study. RQ1: What are the differences of apology strategy patterns between American and Chineseundergraduates? RQ2: What are the differences of apology strategy patterns between male and femaleundergraduates? RQ3: What are the reasonable accounts (pragmatic or cultural) for those differences?...