Pragmatic Competence Study On Chinese French Learners' Requesting Speech Act

This paper examines the pragmatic competence of Chinese French learners in making requests in French,it contributes to the understanding of cross-cultural pragmatics.The research attempt to summarize the characteristics of the learners' request speech act behaviour firstly,then to reveal the pattern of developmental or acquisition process of their pragmatic competence and to figure the potential factors that influence the development of French learners' pragmatic competence.The study focuses on Chinese French learners because here is a pressing need for research of pragmatic competence on learners of foreign languages other than English.As pragmatic competence is cultural and social sensitive,Chinese speakers' experience of French learning inevitably involves cross-cultural reorientation and adaption distinct from English learning so it is promising to enrich the knowledge of both second language acquisition and cross-cultural pragmatics.The study takes the speech act of request as the research subject.As a competitive speech act,request is both typical and common in our daily life and is more likely to harm the hearer's face.The informants involved in the research are junior and senior students of French major from Jilin Huaqiao University of Foreign Languages.The way in which they perform requests in social settings is examined by means of discourse completion test followed by a multiple choice task to investigate their social awareness during the performance of a request speech act.The researcher makes analyses of the collected data from questionnaires to discover certain characteristics of Chinese French learners in performing the speech act of request.The thesis concludes the general sequence and strategy choices of the Chinese French learners and finds that gender,along with social awareness of the informants play a role in the learners' request speech acts besides proficiency level.In addition,the researcher points out the deficiencies of the study,both methodologically and academically and proposes suggestions for further researches.Finally,the researcher makes some suggestions for the improvement of learners' interlanguage pragmatic competence in teaching and learning.