Making Suggestions In Academic Writing:A Contrastive Study Between Chinese Advanced EFL Learners And Mature Writers

In this paper, a contrastive study on the speech act of suggesting in academic writing between Chinese advanced EFL learnersand mature writers is conducted. With the purpose of figuring out the specific types of suggesting, the politeness strategies, which are adopted to soften the degree of face-threatening, and their linguistic realization, as well as the factors underlying the differences between Chinese EFL learners and mature writers when suggestions are made,30MA theses of Chinese postgraduates majoring in applied linguistics and30research articles from the leading journals in the same field are collected and built into two corpora. With the help of Chi-Square tests, close examination of data yields the following findings:A. A new taxonomy of suggesting types in academic writing has been put forward on the basis of directness and the use of mitigating strategies. In addition, statistically significant differences have been observed between Chinese EFL learners and mature writers in the choice of specific suggesting types. Chinese EFL learners tend to be more direct in making suggestions in academic writing.B. Although the examination of specific politeness strategies of the two groups has found a similar trend, the result shows that mature writers adopt more politeness strategies to mitigate their suggestions. In addition, their tendency to modify their suggestions internally is stronger than that of Chinese EFL learners. C. A close study of the linguistic realization of the most common strategy of both groups, which is "internal imposition minimizing", observes significant differences between the two groups. It is apparently that Chinese EFL learners over-rely on modal verbs, especially those indicating obligation while overlooking the use of subjunctive mood and downtoners. The difference also exists in that when adopting "modals state obligation", Chinese EFL learners prefer to make their advisees visible, whom mature writers attempt to hide.D. Three possible factors are identified for the differences in the choices of suggesting types and four for politeness strategies and their linguistic realization respectively. Cultural transfer, lack of confidence in academic writing of EFL learners and influence of education may result in the differences in the choices of suggesting types. Concerning the differences in the choice of politeness strategies, cultural transfer, lack of language proficiency of EFL learners, influence of education as well as overlooking of politeness in academic writing in teaching may contribute.With all the above findings, the present study has both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, it contributes to the understanding of academic writing ability from a pragmatic perspective, offers a new taxonomy of suggesting types in academic writing and enriches the interlanguage pragmatic studies on speech acts. Practically, this study helps Chinese EFL learners improve their academic writing ability, raise their pragmatic awareness and build up their pragmatic competence in academic writing.