An Empirical Study Of Hedging In L2Request Emails

In the history of interlanguage pragmatic research, focus has been on L2learners’ performance in real-world rather than in virtual communication. The present study investigated Chinese L2learners’ pragmatic competence by focusing on their use of hedging strategies when they performed the English speech act of requests in email. Following a cross-sectional deign, the study collected some email data from intermediate group (IG) and advanced group (AG)(30participants respectively) with the peer and the professor as their addressees. The data were elicited by using a background questionnaire, a written task with four scenarios to obtain the demographic information of the participants, the production data of email requests and the participants’ perception of pragmatic parameters respectively. The data were analyzed in terms of tokens and types of hedging strategies, the hedging effect in accordance with face theory, and the students’ awareness of contextual factors to examine the features of Chinese learners’ pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence.The major findings are summarized as follows:1) a. It was found that most of the Chinese L2learners, both IG students and AG students, hedged their requests in their emails. The major category of hedging strategy identified in the study was downtoning strategy, involving the use of modal verbs, pessimistic expressions, minimizing expressions and "please (with clause)",b. Chinese L2learners’ hedging strategies predominantly involved the use of formulaic, lexical and secondarily lexical combinations, and syntactic structures such as "I wonder if,"I will be most grateful if,"I’m sorry...but...","Would you mind...?" IG learners habitually fell back on downtoning like "can". 2) a. In general, the rate of hedging strategies increased as EFL learners’ English proficiency increases. Overall, the advanced learners employed more hedging strategies of each type than IG learners do. AG learners all used hedging when they made requests via email, no matter whether they wrote to the professor or to the peer.b. AG students used strategies other than "subjunctive mood modals" much more often than IG students, while IG students habitually fell back on one single "would" or even "can" to make a high imposed request.c. The AG learners performed better at combined use of hedging strategies, while IG learners used far less combination or disharmonic combination, and clusters were prevalent in the emails that AG wrote. This suggested that the ability of using hedging combinations or clusters developed slowly or rather late among EFL learners.3) Both IG and AG students were aware of the DPR when they did face-threatening act. On the whole, IG students used more hedging strategies when they wrote to the professor than to the peer; AG students used more hedging strategies when they wrote to the professor than to the peer.These findings confirmed the important roles that hedging played in speech act of request in the context of email. The use of hedging strategies effectively mitigated the face threat conveyed by the requestive utterance In addition, the comparison between the AG and IG showed that AG performed better than IG in both types or token of employing hedging strategy and that the pragmatic development of Chinese L2learners was in step with their language proficiencies. Thus, there was still much space for Chinese learners to improve their pragmatic competence, a problem which was ignored for a long time in English learning education.