An Empirical Study Of The English Requests Produced By Junior Middle School Students' In China

In English language learning, students should cultivate not only linguistic ability but also pragmatic ability. The latter includes the ability to perform speech acts such as requests in English. The research on speech acts like requests in English interlanguage have received much attention so far abroad, but have not drawn enough attention in China. And the few relevant studies in China always choose college students as their subjects. There have been no studies about middle school students hitherto.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one gives an overview of origin of this thesis, the significance of studying Chinese learners' production of requests, a glimpse of research methodology and the organization of this thesis. Chapter two presents the research background for the present study. It includes both theories and studies. The theoretical review part includes the speech act theory and the politeness theory. The review of the empirical research comprises three aspects, studies of requests in cross-cultural pragmatics, studies of requests in interlanguage pragmatics and studies of requests in China. Chapter three is mainly concerned with the methodology of the present study, describing objectives and research questions, subjects, instrument, data collection and data analysis procedures. Chapter four presents the results based on the data corresponding to the seven research questions. It also make some discussions by referring to some earlier studies and looking for the possible causes for the discovered phenomena. Chapter five summarizes the research findings, and points out their implications for teaching English as a foreign language.