A Comparative Study Of English Email Requests By Chinese And American University Students

Request speech act has been paid much attention to by researchers in pragmatics. However, through making a comprehensive view of the previous research, linguistic data are collected merely via DCT while there are few studies pertaining to request speech act based on authentic materials. The present study, by combining DCT materials with authentic materials to compare the English email requests between Chinese and American university students, aims to answer the following three questions. First, in English emails, what are the meta-linguistic differences of request speech acts between both groups? Second, what are the differences in terms of pragmatic strategies? Third, how can Chinese students improve their English pragmatic competence and awareness?On the basis of the small-sized self-built corpus from the data collected via DCT and emails, the present study conducts discourse analysis of the English email request speech acts between Chinese and American university students.By means of analyzing data on AntConc and SPSS 18.0, it is revealed: 1) at the meta-linguistic level, on average both the email message and request head act of American students are longer than those of the Chinese students. In addition, American students use email subject more frequently than Chinese students. Moreover, there exist significant differences in the use of high-frequency expressions and patterns between both groups; 2) with regard to pragmatic strategies, differences are also found in the discourse structure of email messages and the strategies of request head acts between the two groups. Therefore, necessary pedagogical intervention should be employed to improve the English pragmatic competence and awareness of Chinese students.