An Empirical Study On Non-English Majors' Acquisition Of English Indirect Request In Chinese Context

In college English teaching, some teachers pay much attention to the students' grammatical competence, but little to the ability to use the language properly in different contexts. Cultivating the students' pragmatic awareness and developing their pragmatic competence are the keys for successful interaction. In fact, college English teachers should put the students' pragmatic competence in a position as important as their linguistic competence.This study is intended to examine how non-English majors' pragmatic abilities in comprehending and using English indirect requests can be acquired in formal classroom and find out some characteristics when students apply English indirect requests. This study tries to answer the following questions:1. Can students' ability to use English indirect request be acquired through formal classroom training?2. If yes, can students' indirect speech acts ability be improved after pragmatic strategy training?3. Are there any characteristics when Chinese students use English indirect request?This study can be divided into two stages. In the first stage, the questionnaire survey, interview and analysis of the textbooks are conducted to examine the present situation of students' acquisition of English indirect requests, which paves the way for the second stage. In the second stage, this study compares two classes of non-English major students' performance of indirect request and analyzes it carefully, in which test-papers and interview are implemented to collect quantitative data. The researcher conducts ten-week pragmatic training in the experiment class and finds that the achievement of the experiment class is much better than the control class through analyzing the qualitative data and quantitative data. The result of the experiment shows that(1) students' ability to use English indirect request can be acquired through classroom instruction;(2) students' indirect speech acts ability can be improved through classroom instruction;(3) there are some characteristics when students use English indirect request. Students would transfer Chinese semantic formulae, syntactic structures and communicative norms in communication, and misunderstood the speech acts.The implication of the study is that college English teachers should pay attention to students' pragmatic knowledge as well as their linguistic knowledge. More cultural information should be introduced to improve students' pragmatic awareness in the process of teaching. In this way, students' pragmatic competence can be improved.