A Comparative Study Of Advice-Giving By Chinese Japanese Learners And Native Japanese Speakers In Consulting Situations

In daily life when we have something to worry about and attempt to search for an answer or find a solution,some of us would choose to confess our worries to family members,close friends or seniors seeking for their advice.Even in this kind of situations where the relationship of the advice searcher and the giver is close,it is essential for the advice giver to watch his/her words or even use some strategies in order not to hurt the listener's self-respect and pride.We want to focus on the words and expressions that could be regarded as the use of the strategies that protect the positive face of the listener in the dialogs of advice givers.The purpose of this study is to describe and find out the reality of the use of positive politeness strategies by Chinese Japanese learners when they face a consulting situation where they are supposed to give advice in Japanese.Also the comparison between learners and native speakers was taken and the reasons that cause the differences were analyzed.We set 6 consulting situations that take place in Japanese based on Brown&Levinson(1987)'s politeness theory and its formula describing face threatening degree and let both Chinese and Japanese participants complete the dialogs if they were the advice giver.We picked out the expressions and sentences that can be regarded as the use of positive politeness strategies in every situation and analyzed the differences between the two groups.As a result,only in situations where a serious problem is dealt with was a significant difference found between learners and native speakers.Specifically,native speakers can make a shift flexibly among different kinds of politeness strategies while learners are still weak in using hedges and expressions presenting actions beside “V tara”.What's more,native speakers tend to use “to offer or promise” strategy such as “You can consult with me” and “I'll listen,I'm always withyou” more frequently while learners use more “to encourage” strategy which includes conviction expressions such as “it'll be OK absolutely”.It is thought that inadequate explanation by teacher in class,imprinting from textbooks and influence from mother language cause these differences and problems.