An Interlanguage Pragmatics Analysis Of Chinese Students' Interlanguage Request Behavior

So far there have been quite a few studies on speech act of requests in the West, such as Ervin-Tripp (1976, 1981), Brown & Levinson (1987), Bilbow (1995), Tsui (2000), etc. To the contrary, up to now only a few Chinese scholars have conducted their studies on requests. And in most of the studies, all of the languages and varieties studied are either Germanic or Romance and all of the cultures investigated are either Western or heavily influenced by Western culture. Therefore, it is quite necessary to conduct a research program concerning requests in Eastern culture, especially those represented by Chinese Confucian culture, hoping that further evidence can be found to support the former studies about request behaviors and to let other people get familiar with the features of Chinese English---one of the world English families.Therefore, this study tends to examine how the speech acts are performed in a second language by analyzing request behaviors made by the Chinese learners of English. A group of non-English major students are examined on how they perform requests in everyday situations compared with a group of English native speakers and a group of Chinese native speakers. The data were collected by means of DCT (discourse completion test) questionnaire. Results show that 1) the same structural forms (interrogatives, declaratives and imperatives ) for conveying requests would be used by the Chinese English learners; 2) each of the request strategies (directness, conventionally indirectness, non-conventionally indirectness and opting out) is available to the Chinese English learners; 3) social distance and dominance do have great effects on the level of directness of requests for subjects; 4) for the Chinese native speakers, the females like to use the opting out, but the males use more direct and conventionally indirect strategies than the females; 5) the Chinese English learners use more modification than the English native speakers. The findings spot the occurrence of pragmatic failures, conclude the special characteristics of the Chinese English learners'request behavior and emphasize the potential importance of the effect of formal instruction. The study also supports the claim of Bialystok that the main task for adult learners of L2 pragmatics is to gain control over knowledge rather than knowledge itself. It advances certain pedagogical implications in the aspects of instruction, chunk learning, attitudes to L2 pragmatic norms, and learner subjectivity.