An Interlanguage Study Of Speech Acts Of Request By Zhuang Learners Of Chinese

Bilingual education has been practiced as a key component of minority education for a long period of time in areas inhabited by ethnic minorities in China. Contrastive studies in Chinese and minority language aimed to improve the teaching and learning of Chinese have, however, focused mainly on phonetic, lexical and grammatical levels.This thesis, based on the principles of interlanguage pragmatics, conducted a contrastive study in the realization of the speech act of request by Zhuang learners of Chinese, native speakers of Chinese, and native speakers of Zhuang. Results from analyzing data collected from the three groups of subjects by means of discourse completion test (DCT) indicate that the Zhuang learners basically perform their requests according to the situations. Meanwhile, due to L1 transfer and the learners'insufficient knowledge of the Chinese language, some interlanguage traits are found to exist in their realization of the speech act of request. These traits include (1) overgeneralization, which is mainly manifested in learners'use of imperative and conventionally indirect request strategies; (2) pragmatic transfer, which is observed in learners'use of goal statements, alerters, and supportive moves; and (3) verbosity, which is found in learners'use of supportive moves.Suggestions are made on how to improve the teaching of Chinese as a second language to Zhuang students.