A Contrastive Study Of The Strategies Used By Chinese EFL Students And American Students In The Performance Of Refusal

For students, learning a foreign language not only means learning the grammar, pronunciation and the lexicon of the target language, but also means how to use the language in a polite, appropriate and effective way so as to minimize misunderstanding, embarrassment or offense and maximize the possibility of successful communication.This study is undertaken to investigate the similarities and differences of the strategies used by Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) students and American students, with a particular focus on the speech act of refusal. The study is conducted from the perspective of cross-cultural communication within the theoretical framework of Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies and Gu Yueguo's politeness principles. The research questions addressed in the study are as follows:1. Do American students and Chinese EFL students perform the refusal speech act in the same way?2. In what way are they similar to or different from each other in the performance of the refusal act?3. What are the underlying factors responsible for their preferred choice of refusal making strategies?The design of the study consists of two parts. One is quantitative, the other is qualitative. The former is a Discourse Completion Test questionnaire including 12 situations, and the latter is an interview. 80 subjects participated in the quantitative study and they fell into two groups. One group consists of 30 American students who are studying at different universities and colleges in Shanghai. They answered all the questions in English. The other group consists of 50 Chinese EFL students, and they answered the questions in Chinese. The speech act examined here was that of substantive verbal refusals. The initiating acts of refusing in the DCT were: request, invitation, offer and suggestion. In the procedure of data analysis, the factor of social status was taken as a controlled variable. The results of the quantitative study are demonstrated and discussed on the basis of the data processed through Chi-square test in SPSS 10.0 and Microsoft Excel. The qualitative research design was an interview with three open-ended questions. The interview included two parts, one for the 5 Chinese students and the other for the 5 American students.The major findings from this study are as follows:1. There are both similarities and differences in the performance of refusal speech act by Chinese EFL students and American students.2. The similarities lying in the selection of refusal strategies between Chinese EFL students and American students are that both Chinese EFL students and American students use more indirect refusal strategies than direct refusal strategies when performing refusal speech act because indirect refusals are considered to be more polite than direct refusals in both cultures. In addition, the indirect refusal strategies preferred by both Chinese EFL students and American students are characterized by the strategy of reasons, the strategy of dissuasion, the strategy of alternatives and the strategy of regret. By using such skills, Chinese EFL students and American students can mitigate the threat of refusals and thus save faces of both parties.3. The differences in the choice of refusal strategies between the two groups of subjects are that Chinese EFL students employ more refusal strategies than American students do. Besides, though both prefer indirect strategies, Chinese EFL students show greater interest in indirect strategies and are more sensitive about the mode of communication when making refusals than American students. Finally, Chinese EFL students exhibit obvious differences in the number or variety of the strategies used to make refusals to people of different social status while American students display slight differences in such cases.4. There are different cultural value orientations underlying the choice of strategies by Chinese EFL students and American students when performing the refusal speech act. The study finds that, among the cultural reasons that cause the significant difference, the core is the western politeness strategies represented by the view of individual as the central of society—individualism, and the Chinese politeness maxims represented by the view of individual being subject to society—collectivism. Apart from the general cultural value orientations, specific contexts of the communications including the age and genders of the interlocutors also influence the choice of refusal strategies by the Chinese EFL students and American students.The significance of the study is that it will help Chinese EFL students to have a better understanding of the refusal patterns accepted by native English speaker, and help them to improve their pragmatic awareness and choices of communicative strategies.