An Investigation On Chinese Farewell Speech Act Carried Out By Intermediate-level And High-level Overseas Students

This paper focuses on the Chinese farewell speech act carried out by intermediate-level and high-level overseas students.Based on the face-saving theory and politeness strategy,this paper compares the farewell strategies and the output farewell words of overseas students with those of Chinese native speakers.Then we analyze them from the perspective of pragmatic competence.First of all,by referring to the previous research results and combining with the collected farewell corpus,we divide the farewell strategies into 3 categories and 18 subcategories.Then in the form of a discourse completion test,the survey was conducted on the farewell speech act carried out by overseas students of intermediate level and high level.Taking the farewell strategies and the farewell words of Chinese native speakers as reference,and combining quantitative and qualitative research,this paper analyzes the differences between the three groups of subjects from the macroscopic and microscopic perspectives.We also find out some pragmatic errors of overseas stLudents.The research results show that:1.When using three categories of farewell strategies,five kinds of conventional farewell words and indirect farewell strategies,there were statistically significant differences among the three groups.There was no statistically significant difference between the three groups when the adj uvant measures were used.2.In the communication,intermediate-level and high-level overseas students'sensitivity to the differences in intimacy and social status between the two parties is not high enough.Their sociopragmatic competence is not strong enough.Some overseas students are not able to carry out the farewell speech act properly according to the different communicative obj ects.3.On the whole,the high-level overseas students were closer to Chinese native speakers when they carried out farewell speech act.Their pragmalinguistic competence is stronger than intermediate-level overseas students.And they mastered some characteristic Chinese farewell words that were not mastered by the intermediate-level overseas students.4.When using strategies such as "explain things","comfort each other" and"make promises",some intermediate-level overseas students avoided the above strategies,and the frequency of using these strategies was obviously low.When using strategies such as"positive comments","expressing gratitude" and "expressing wishes",overseas students used them more frequently and expressed more abundance.They used some characteristic farewell expressions which are not found in C hinese.5.Due to the lack of classroom pragmatic teaching or insufficient use of Chinese after class,intermediate-level and high-level overseas students both have pragmatic errors in their farewell words.And the errors in intermediate-level roup are slightly more than those in high-level group.Finally,on the basis of this research,we put forward some suggestions for the pragmatic teaching of TCSL,hoping to improve the pragmatic competence of overseas students to carry out farewell speech act.