A Comparative Analysis Of Complaint Strategies In Direct Complaints Between Chinese And American College Students

Complaint is a common and subtle speech act in Chinese and English, which embodies that there exists correlation between the significance of complaint and the specific language contexts. In addition, the relevant factors affecting the performance of complaint are complex. On the other hand, language and culture are inseparably intertwined. Chinese and American different cultural backgrounds exert delicate influence on communication. Therefore, the way to perform the speech act of complaining appropriately will help to solve the problem actively, maintain the sound interpersonal relationship and even eliminate the misunderstanding resulting from cultural difference. However, based on the collected academic papers and monographs in recent years, we find that few studies on Chinese and English complaints have appeared in literature, especially the study on complaint strategies in Chinese and English.Complaints can be further classified into direct complaints and indirect complaints. And the data collected from the ten situations in this study are all categorized into direct complaints. 180 participants in the study fall into two groups, namely, 100 Chinese college students (native Chinese speakers as well as Chinese EFL learners) and 80 American college students (native English speakers). Data for this study were collected via a written questionnaire in the form of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT). Through the comparative analysis of all the direct complaints, the present study aims to present the frequencies and distributions of complaint strategies adopted in direct complaints by Chinese and American college students, and whether Chinese EFL learners transfer their cultural norms to the target language communication. It explores the correlation between complaint strategies selection and cultural patterns. In addition, a model of six complaint strategies is presented in the thesis.For the two groups making the responses to the ten situations in their mother tongues respectively, the most general finding is that there are some similarities but more differences in complaint strategies selection in Chinese and English. Most of Chinese and American students tend to perform complaints in given situations. In the high-context collectivistic Chinese culture, the features of complaint strategies reveal that Chinese politeness stresses the positive face and people usually complain in an indirect and implicit way; however, in the low-context individualistic American culture, the features of complaint strategies display the evidences that American politeness emphasizes the negative face in interaction, and direct and explicit face-negotiation strategies are frequently employed. Chinese use off-record strategies most frequently while Americans use with redress most frequently. In general, the frequencies of request for repair, opting out and explicit complaint are high in two languages. But the strategy of hints is the most frequent strategy used by Chinese students and request for repair is the most frequent strategy by American students.On the other hand, based on the data collected from the same group of Chinese EFL learners, this thesis makes comparison of the complaint strategies selection in both native language Chinese and target language English. When communicating in English, the Chinese EFL learners do transfer their cultural norms to the target language communication. This indicates when the learners' native cultural norms are quite different from that of the target language; they would probably commit cultural transfers, which are caused by the underlying cultural differences of the two societies.The findings and discussions of this study reinforce the research of complaining speech act and suggest some pedagogical implications to English teaching and cross-cultural communication.