Politeness Degreses Of Chinese EFL Learners' Speech Acts Of Request

Politeness is the symbol or manifestation of human civilization and it is one of the most effective strategies modulating interpersonal relationship in human communication. As a universal phenomenon, politeness can be observed in all languages and cultures, and it has long been made an important area of language study ever since it was studied systematically by British scholars Brown and Levinson in the book of Politeness:Some Universals in Language Usage in 1987. Up to the present, a lot of linguistics, experts on pragmatics and language learners have conducted profound and systematic studies and formulated related theories on politeness, however, almost all the existing articles on politeness degree are found to be just on the theory plane. Based on the Speech Act Theory, the Politeness Principle, Three Scales for Politeness theory and the theory on request strategies, the present study is targeted at Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in the higher learning institution. It attempts to uncover their request strategy choices and the nature of the relationship between learners'language proficiency and the politeness degrees of speech acts of request.80 Chinese EFL learners participated in this study. One group of 40 are junior students from Chengdu College of Sichuan Normal University, and they major in English. The other group are sophomores from the same college, majoring in marketing. Two types of data-collection instruments, Written Discourse Completion Tasks (WDCT) and Multiple-choice Discourse Completion Tasks (MDCT) are employed to test how speakers perform requests over the influence of the two social variables, social distance (D) and social status/power (P) in the study.640 request speech acts in total were elicited from the participants and they were classified into there types according to their different politeness scales, i.e. Direct request (less polite), Conventional Indirect request (polite) and Non-conventional Indirect request (more polite). The collected data were put into computers, and the statistical software SPSS 13.0 was adopted to test the differences between the two groups'politeness degrees of request speech acts and find out the correlations between learners'language proficiency and politeness degrees of speech acts.The research finds out that:①Though the most preferable request strategy for both the two groups is Conventional Indirect strategy, there are still differences in their use of Direct and Non-conventional Indirect strategies. For the English Major group, participants prefer Non-conventional strategies to Direct ones, while the Non-English Major group make more Direct strategy choices rather than Non-conventional ones.②The difference between the two groups of Chinese EFL learners'request politeness degrees is significant. Students in the English Major group tend to obtain high politeness degrees in their request performances while the politeness degrees of requests made by Non-English Major students are found to be at a comparatively low level. The predominating request preference of English Major students is No-conventional Indirect or Conventional Indirect request while the Non-English Major students'predominating request preference is Direct or Conventional Indirect request.③The two social variables (P and D) have significant influences over the politeness degrees of requests. The politeness degrees of requests vary when the interlocutors'social status and social distances change. When the interlocutors are estranged with each other, the sequence of politeness degrees of requests on the two social variables of English Major group and Non-English Major group are the same:D+P+> D+P-> D+P=. That is, When the hearer is of a higher power over the speaker, the politeness degrees of requests are higher than that when the hearer is of an equal or lower social status. In situations where the hearer is of a higher power, the majority of Chinese EFL learners choose to make Non-conventional Indirect requests while they tend to make Conventional Indirect or Direct requests in other situations.The findings of this research, to a certain degree, conform to what has been declaimed by Brown and Levinson (1987). They declaim that the face-threatening weightiness of a speech act increases when the social distance becomes greater and the power of the hearer becomes higher over the speaker, thus the politeness degree of the speech act must be at a higher level. However, to some extent, the results reported in the research violate Brown and Levinson's account:it is found in the research that social distance being equal, when the interlocutors are of equal power, the request preference of Chinese EFL learners is Direct or Conventional Indirect request and the corresponding politeness degrees of requests are even at a lower level than that when the hearer is of lower power over the speaker. What's more, the findings form statistical analyses of Non-English Major learners'speech acts of request indicate that if the interlocutors are acquaintances, the request preference of Non-English Major students is Direct request and the corresponding politeness degrees of requests when the hearer is of higher social status are even lower than that when the hearer is of equal social status with the speaker.Hopefully, the study can uncover some characteristics of Chinese English learners' speech acts of request and reveal the links between learners'language proficiency and the politeness degrees of their request speech acts. The thesis is intended to provide some useful suggestions on cross-cultural communication for Chinese learners and EFL teaching and learning in China.