| How to address politely in mitigating Face Threatening Acts (FTA) is construed as an important indicator to evaluate the pragmatic competence of language learners. In this case,174 Chinese EFL Learners from a ("Project 211" university of Northeastern China were involved in the study where the data are collected via questionnaires and analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively, with an aim to explore the acquisition of politeness by Chinese EFL learners,regarding to normal politeness,over-politeness and impoliteness respectively. The results reveal that: first, Chinese EFL learners employ various forms to express normal politeness, over-politeness and impoliteness, where there is a tendency to use more over-polite expressions with a high level of contextualization. Second, language proficiency has little impact on the politeness acquisition by English majors, but significantly affects the politeness acquisition by non-English majors. With the rise of language proficiency level, impoliteness acquired by non-English majors obtains the fastest improvement, which is followed by normal politeness acquisition. However, over-politeness acquisition shows no significant change with the improvement of language proficiency. Third,gender impact on politeness acquisition is more diversified than expected in that gender has little impact on the overall acquisition of politeness; in terms of normal politeness, gender impact decreases with the improvement of language proficiency; gender significantly influences on over-politeness acquisition, which is manifested by the fact that females have higher acquisition level than male counterparts; gender has little impact on impoliteness acquisition. These results are beneficial for a clear understanding of the situation and the evaluation of pragmatic competence by Chinese EFL learners. Finally, the shortcomings of this study are also to be noted, with possibilities for the subsequent studies to further explore with comparison. |
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