A Study On Compliment Response Strategies Of Chinese College Students In Compliment Speech Act

Compliment speech act is one of the most important speech acts in human interactions. During communication, people will inevitably come up to the situation in which they compliment others or receive compliments from others. Such a speech act is intriguing to many scholars. The researches on the compliment speech act are bountiful and diversified in terms of different perspectives. This thesis studies the compliment response strategies of Chinese EFL learners and explore whether different degrees of English proficiency will lead to different choices of compliment response strategies. The null hypothesis of this study is that CR strategies adopted by language users are in relation to their English proficiency.This thesis collects the compliment response strategies of Chinese college students by the empirical investigation and summarizes compliment response strategies used by different groups. According to the subjects’marks of CET-6, the subjects are listed from high marks to low marks. The first30students form Group2, i.e. the higher English proficiency group and the last30students comprise Group1, which refers to the lower English proficiency group. The objectives of this thesis are as follows:first, collect the general patterns of compliment response strategies of Chinese college students and summarize the frequency distributions of these compliment response strategies; second, compare and contrast the similarities and differences between the two groups; third, try to discuss the relation between English proficiency and compliment response strategies of Chinese college students.This research aims at the subjects whose mother tongue is Chinese and their foreign language is English. The instruments the research uses are Discourse Completion Test and Retrospective Interview. The test gives out4common topics occurring in daily life written in English. Altogether8situations are created in the test. The subjects are required to write down their responses to each specific situation. The subjects who participate in this test are90students in the fourth grade randomly selected from Anhui University. The results are as follows:(1) The study categorizes the CR strategies into two main types:acceptance and rejection. The study summarizes3CR strategy modes,4macro CR strategies and14micro CR strategies. The two groups tend to use more acceptance than rejection. Combined strategies are used most frequently, followed by single strategy and null strategy in sequence. The distributions of CR strategies list from high to low as follows:explicit acceptance, implicit acceptance, implicit rejection, and explicit rejection which are in conformity with the line lowering down along the continuum. The three most frequently used micro CR strategies are appreciation token, returning compliment, and shifting credit. The two least frequently used micro CR strategies are joke and disagreement. Among the new strategies, vocal strategy is used more often than graphic strategy and supplement strategy.(2) With the technique of the Chi-square tests, the result of X2is6(P=0.306>0.01) so there is no significant difference between the two groups in their choices of CR strategy modes. When the subjects choose the macro CR strategies, the result of X2is8(P=0.333>0.01), which proves that there is no significant difference between the two groups. When the subjects choose the micro CR strategies, the result of X2is23.333(P=0.441>0.01), which proves that there is no significant difference between the two groups. The results from these three perspectives reject the null hypothesis proposed at the beginning.(3) The results of the Chi-square tests show that there is no significant relation between CR strategies used by Chinese college students and their English proficiency. The results from the retrospective interview indicate that the similarities might be the outcome of overgeneralization and pragmatic transfer of the students and the reserved feature and modesty of Chinese politeness. The frequency distributions of this research are different from those found by other scholars. What is different from the results of other scholars is that the two groups have no significant difference. The reason of no relation between the two groups might be the high English proficiency of the two groups.The thesis investigates the CR strategies of Chinese EFL learners and elaborates their CR strategies from a new perspective of times. Its research results are of certain illumination to English language teaching and second language acquisition. However, due to limited time and flaws on research methods and tools, the study still needs improving.