Vocational Technical College English Major's Differences From Native English Speakers In Performing Requests

Request, as a special kind of speech act, has attracted considerable attention in second language acquisition research for a number of reasons. One of them is that requests are intrinsically face-threatening acts (FTAs) in terms of the definition: addressees can interpret requests as intrusive impingements on freedom of action, or even as a show of power exercise (Brown & Levinson 1987). If requests are not made appropriately, the desired goal may not be reached. Meanwhile the hearer may be embarrassed, or the relationship may be damaged. Other things being equal, generally the larger the request is, the greater the imposition is on the hearer. Thus, they call for considerable linguistic expertise on the part of the learner.Requests'realization patterns differ cross-linguistically. The study of how Chinese vocational technical college English majors perform the speech act of request provides data of three groups of participants through discourse completion test (DCT) questionnaires with six request situations in it. The collected data are analyzed from the following perspectives: request forms; request modifications and request strategies relating to such parameters as social distance, social power (dominance), age and gender. Differences were shown in the participants'selection of request forms, request modifications and request strategies, which distinguish the group of vocational technical college English majors from the group of native English speakers and the group of native Chinese speakers.The results from the analysis indicate that there are both similarities and differences, but differences are more obvious between the group of vocational technical college English majors and the group of native English speakers in terms of request forms, request modification and request strategy selection, which can be summarized as follows:The first similarity lies in the structural forms, the same of which would be used by vocational technical college English majors and native English speakers for conveying requests. The second one appears in that both native English speakers and vocational technical college English majors like to use modifications in conveying a request. And they like to use more internal modification than the external one. The last one lies in that request strategies (directness, conventionally indirectness and non-conventionally indirectness), each of which is employed by both vocational technical college English majors and native English speakers. Among the strategies the most frequently used one is the conventionally indirect for both vocational technical college English majors and native English speakers. And the preferential order of request strategies employed is ranked as: conventionally indirect>direct> non-conventionally strategies>indirect. Similarly, for both language groups the independent variables (social distance, dominance, age and gender) affect the level of directness of requests greatly.As for differences, vocational technical college English majors employ fewer interrogatives than native English speakers. But vocational technical college English majors use more declaratives and imperatives than native English speakers.In addition, whatever the social distance and the dominance of the interlocutors are, vocational technical college English majors use more non-conventionally indirect strategy than the native English speakers.What's more, the native English speakers and vocational technical college English majors use more direct strategy between strangers than between friends; the native speakers of English will use it when the speaker dominates the hearer; vocational technical college English majors hold the same, but much less than the other group. And vocational technical college English majors use more modifications than the native English speakers.From these findings comes the implication that paying more attention to language learners'perception and production of request in different situations may be of much help for their realization of the speech act of request. The present study is an attempt in vocational technical college English majors'request acquisition research, which may, to some extent, facilitate vocational technical college English majors'request acquisition and offer some new theoretical insights into the issue in Second language acquisition as well.