A Contrastive Study On Request Strategy From A Cross-cultural Perspective

As the title of this paper indicates, this research is intended to study and analyze the common and different strategies of requests employed in English and Chinese in a contrastive approach, which is based on the questionnaire survey of American students and the Chinese students. Request is chosen mainly because it is widely used in a variety of situations of our daily life. For example, asking somebody to pass the salt at the dinner table, or asking someone to turn down the TV. Up to date, there are few studies about cross-cultural request strategies between English and Chinese, although this research is based on many researches of scholars. Therefore, this research employs quantitative study based on discourse analysis(桂诗春,宁春岩1997)and qualitative study in order to find out the underlying cultural factors responsible for such differences on the basis of studying and analyzing the differences in choices of request strategies by Chinese and American students.The research questions of the present study are as follows:(1) Are there any similarities and differences between Chinese students and American students in the performance of request strategies? If any, what are the differences? (2) What are the underlying cultural factors responsible for differences in the choices of request strategies by Chinese and American students?This research was conducted both quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative research employed Discourse Completion Test (DCT) as the questionnaire which was once used in Cross-cultural Speech Act Research Project (CCSARP) hosted by Blum-Kulka and some scholars in 1989. This paper chooses 12 situations based on the previous studies, which includes a variety of social relationships in real interaction, such as friends, strangers and classmates etc. In order not to affect informants and get true data, this research makes the students answer questions by their own experience. Every situation under which the acts happen is described in the questionnaire and then informants answer questions by themselves. There were two groups of subjects (totaling 100) taking part in this study:a group of native speakers of English (AM) with 40 students in a university of America,24 males and 16 females and a group of native speakers of Chinese (CHN) with 60 students in a university in China,30 males and 30 females. The qualitative research includes an interview, involving 6 interviewees out of the Chinese group and 4 out of American group respectively. Stratified random sampling was used to select 10 students for the interview to find out the cultural factors responsible for the similarities and differences in use of request strategy.Because the choice of subjects may affect results of the study, this research takes the following points into consideration:(1) the informants are all the students in order to keep their educational background uniform; (2) all the informants are from 18 to 21 years old; (3) and none of informants are majoring in linguistics.And according to the differences between the American and Chinese request strategies, this paper concludes:(1) As for direct strategies, they are proper and effective among Chinese students while they are less used by AM.(2) When making requests, alerters and modifiers used by CHN and AM are much different, and CHN prefers to put supportive moves before the head acts, whereas, AM prefers to use supportive moves after the head acts. These all show the different cultural features between Chinese and English.(3) a) the different notions about collectivism-individualism, power distance and polite system influence the students'choices of using request strategies; b) the different system of address forms in two countries affect informants'choices of alerters; c) induced thinking and deduced thinking affect Chinese and American students choosing pre-modification or post-modification.Findings from this study have following pedagogical implication. Teachers should not only improve their abilities in the request strategy but they should also explain and analyze the cultural factors embedded in the request speech acts in class.The main weakness of the study may be the number of subjects can not represent the whole population and the ignorance of nonverbal language in discourse, the age, the gender etc, which need more researchers do more comprehensive and deeper researches.