A Study On The Conversational Structure Of The "inquiry" Speech Act Of Elementary Chinese Learners

Inquiry is one of the most common speech acts in daily communication.Question and answer is also frequently used in spoken Chinese textbooks for foreigners.As an important way for students to acquire and learn Chinese,teaching and textbooks should be arranged reasonable conversation structure.In this paper,discourse analysis is used to analyze the conversations of 20 elementary Chinese learners from different countries when they complete a two-way communication task,(1)They tend to use the adjacent structure.(2)They tend to take turns in simple sentences,especially in subject-predicate sentences.(3)They tend to use "answer"?"feedback"?"inquiry" and "accept"as the response.In addition,some problems are found:(1)The adjacency pair is too simple.(2)The type of response is simple and tends to end the conversation early with a simple answer.(3)They always tend to select simple sentences,especially subject-predicate sentences.(4)The subjective initiative of asking and explaining in Chinese is not strong.This paper proposes some methods.Firstly reasonable arrangement of conversational structure in textbooks,and add embedded or adjacent embedded hybrid structure.Secondly,by combining class teaching with after-class practice,students can realize the importance of concepts and conversational structure to successful communication.At last,the paper puts forward some suggestions on the Chinese teaching.It is expected to provide suggestions on arrangement of conversational structure and the compilation of textbooks.