Strategies For Requesting In Chinese: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

Based on a survey of the Chinese request strategies adopted by European and American students (EA),Japanese and Korean students (JK), native Chinese students studying abroad (NCA) and non-English major Chinese graduate students at home (NCH), this contrastive study tries to reveal the differences and similarities of the request strategies adopted by these four groups of students with different cultural backgrounds as well as factors contributing to the differences and similarities. It's all known that a lot of studies have been conducted on request strategies, however my present research is focused on Chinese request strategies employed by foreign students with Western and Eastern cultural backgrounds as well as Chinese request strategies used by Chinese students studying both home and abroad. As we know, people from different cultural backgrounds may adopt different request strategies, though they speak the same language.In order to explore into the differences and similarities of the Chinese request strategies adopted by the people from different cultural backgrounds, the present study carries out a survey on the use of strategies for making requests in Chinese by the above four groups of students ( totaling 203 students). The questionnaire used in the study is made up of 20 conversational situations in which request speech act may be performed. It is designed on the basis of the questionnaires used by Western scholars. After careful modification, it proves to be applicable to the study of the speech act of request performed in Chinese in various daily situational sets. Besides, in order to find the causes for the differences and similarities in adopting the request strategies by the students in the four groups, a series of planned interviews are conducted with some of the surveyed students from the four groups.The present study focuses on the following three aspects: (1) a general description of the request strategies employed by the four surveyed groups; (2) an analysis of the differences in the use of request strategies by the four groups; (3) an analysis of the factors contributing to the similarities and differences in the use of the request strategies by the students in the four groups.Our data analyses yield the following major findings. Firstly, the four groups of students used three types of request strategies in the same preferential order as follows: conventionally indirect > direct strategy > non-conventionally indirect (with">"meaning"more frequent than"); the relative frequency of using request alerters by the four groups shows the following tendency: NCH>JK>NCA>EA; and the relative frequency of adopting supportive moves of request by the four groups shows the following pattern: JK>NCH>NCA>EA. Secondly, there are significant and insignificant differences between a pair of two groups in adopting the three types of request strategies, with regard to the six situational sets analyzed, to social distance (big and small) between the requester and the requestee, and to social dominance (strong, weak and equal) between the requester and the requestee. And finally, we have identified three possible factors contributing to the differences between the surveyed groups in adopting request strategies: 1) parataxis vs. hypotaxis as a linguistic factor, 2) social dominance vs. social equality orientation as a social factor, and 3) collectivism vs. individualism as a cultural factor.