A Pragmatic Study Of Chinese EFL Learners' Complaints In English

As we know, the ultimate goal of learning a foreign language is to communicate in that language. Therefore, acquiring communicative competence is very important in language instruction. In the course of English language teaching, the teachers are supposed to enable the students to communicate effectively and appropriately; and students should pay particular attention to cross-cultural differences, so as to reduce communicative failure.Pragmatic competence is an essential component of communicative competence. It should be kept as an important goal for English learners, and teachers should try hard to help improve Chinese students' pragmatic competence. The study of speech acts in interlanguage can serve as one of the basic tools of exploring the EFL (English as a foreign language) learners' pragmatic competence. In order to survey the Chinese EFL learners' pragmatic competence, the author made a contrastive study of three groups of people, namely, native Chinese, Chinese EFL learners, and native Americans. 55 Chinese and 12 Americans participate in the study. Data for this study was collected via a written questionnaire in the form of the Discourse Completion Test (DCT). Nine situations for complaint are included in the questionnaire.From the responses they made when they complain in Chinese or English, we found that they do not differ significantly in the range of complaining strategies. All the three groups use the six strategy types listed in this paper. The most frequently used strategy by them is Explicit Complaint, and the second one is Opting out. But in some specific situations, their choice of strategies is different. The paper also presents some interlanguage features of the Chinese EFL learners from the perspectives of utterance length, use of modification, moralization and expressions of understanding. Their responses show that their pragmatic competence should be improved. 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.The present thesis contains five chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to the background, significance and general purpose of the study. Chapter Two is literature review, it reviews speech act theory, theories on politeness , complaint as a speech act and previous studies of complaint speech acts. Chapter Three explains the methodology of the study, which includes essential parts of the research design, that is, research questions, subjects, instrument, questionnaire, data analysis methods, and predictions. Chapter Four made a qualitative and quantitative study of the results of the data collected. A set of complaint strategies based on the data is developed in this chapter. It analyzes the similarities and differences of complaint strategies used by Chinese and Americans in the given situations. It also presents some interlanguage features of the Chinese EFL learners from the perspectives of utterance length, use of modification, moralization and expressions of understanding. Finally, Chapter Four makes an analysis of complaint strategies from the cultural perspective. The last part, Chapter Five discusses the conclusion and implications of the findings and provides the limitations and suggestions for the further study in this field.