A Pragmatic Study On English Learners' Compliments In Different Regions Of China

With the development of English as a global language,researches on English learners' ability in using the language has become the main concern for English teachers and other scholars.As a kind of positive speech act,compliment serves a very important role in establishing and maintaining good social relationships.Therefore,studies on the English learners' compliment in SL context are of great necessity.However,many of the studies on English learners' compliment so far at home and abroad focused much on the influence of traditional topics,such as the gender,education background,social class and social distance and English proficiency,etc.and most studies concerned in this field are contrastive studies between EFL or ESL learners and English native speakers.Nevertheless,China now is in its primary stage of development.Regional unbalances appeared in political,economic and cultural aspects.As the previous studies put forward,regional differences may also reflect in the language selection of different language communities.Therefore,from the perspective of Interlanguage,this paper attempted to explore the regional influence on the EFL learners' compliment in English in order to examine if there are any pragmatic distinctions among Shanghai,Jiangsu and Guizhou province.The pragmatic competence of English learners in different regions of China is also analyzed in this paper.Compliment data of 300 participants was collected by WDCT questionnaires with eight situations.The results showed that,in general,all these three groups of English learners prefer to use explicit compliment strategies to express their positive feelings towards the hearers with slight difference in the selection of implicit strategies.However,in Appearance-related situations and Performance-related situations,significant differences of implicit strategies using appeared.Namely pragmatic distinctions indeed exist in English learners from different regions of China.