A Corpus-based Study Of Pragmatic Competence Of Non-English Majors

Request speech act is close to being the prototype case of a social transaction(Bruner et al.,1982).While most studies on request speech act mainly focus on the strategies of request speech act,this study will launch a cross-sectional study involving error types and expressing features of non-English-majors from colleges of Shandong Province.The study of the request speech act of non-English-majors at different stages can further clarify the pragmatic competence of the non-English-majors at each stage.It will contribute to the revelation of teaching in the English classroom,thus improving the teaching effectiveness.This study presents a corpus-based study of request speech acts of undergraduate students from colleges in Shandong Province.Toward this end,data is collected through written discourse completion tasks and language contact questionnaire.Participants consist of 434 students involving freshmen,sophomores and juniors from non-English majors in Shandong province.The questionnaire includes 14 request scenarios,focusing on the basic requirements of the non-English majors on campus.The error types are marked manually.Main research tools in this study is UAM Corpus and SPSS 25.0.The main findings are presented as follows:About 40%of the participants have made errors in the study,and pragmatic failures explain the majority of the total error number,among which sociopragmatic failures is the most frequently occurring error type.Based on the results of One-way ANOVA test,the frequency of some error types is significantly different across three groups,namely:1)sequential mistakes between subject and predicate;2)incorrect use of verbs;3)spelling mistakes;4)redundancy or lack of words;5)incorrect collocation;6)inappropriate use of alerters;7)incorrect use of collocation;8)inappropriate alerters.The result of the error analysis shows that most error types could be explained as the result of negative language transfer.For example,the most frequently occurring error type is inappropriate alerters.Participants tend to use the alerters that they use in Chinese,such as "teacher(??)" and "classmate(??)".Learners' request expressing features are analyzed from their request strategies.Social factors and negative language transfer are found influencing the request expressing features.From the respect of request strategy,participants tend to use conventionally indirect strategies especially query preparatory.And participants have a preference for modal verbs,such as"could+you+verb","can+you+verb" and "can+I+verb".Power and social distance also have a clear influence on the choices of request strategies.Participants tend to use different request strategies in three different situational scenarios.When interacting with a more powerful and higher-status interlocutor,participants tend to use more conventional indirect strategies while participants are inclined to use more conventional indirect strategies and direct strategies,especially imperatives when interacting with an equal-status interlocutor.This study suggests that teachers in colleges and universities shall adopt different teaching strategies and add explicit teaching of the pragmatic knowledge aimed at different stages of non-English majors.In addition,due to the difficulty of corpus building and recruiting,the size of the corpus used in this study is comparatively small.For the future research,we should,other than the corpus size,also cover the social factors to present the request speech act in different situations.