Pragmatic Study Of Requests Made By Chinese Learners Of English

In order to find out the pragmatic competence of Chinese learners of English，ourimportance is attached to their acquisition-phase when making requests. A learners’corpus was created, subjects being112college students and their performance to makerequests in26situations recorded via Goldwave, one of the software for recording, andthen transcribed in order to avoid being criticized of collecting the oral data by writtenOral Discourse-Completion Tests. The26situations were decided on by learnersthemselves rather than by researchers after three-round questionnaires. Data of Englishnative speakers when making requests have been collected in two different universitiesto compare with the40learners group (20CET-4group and20CET-6group in thecorpus). The research methods adopted include: error analysis, contrastive analysis andcorpus-based research methods. Research tools involved are recording software----Goldwave, analysis software----SPSS, and search software----AntConc.The main findings presented are as follows:1. Error analysis shows that Chinese learners of English, when making requestson campus, make errors almost in more one fourth of their utterances. The errors theymake fall into two categories: grammatical mistakes and pragmatic failures. Thegrammatical mistakes consist of syntactic mistakes and gramma-lexical mistakes andthe pragmatic failures cover pragma-linguistic failures and socio-pragmatic failures.The data shows pragmatic failures constitute78.9%of the overall errors, of whichsocio-pragmatic failures alone are58.6%.The number of errors is influenced by both the social status of listeners andspeakers’ achievements. The number of errors, particularly that of the address forms,increases in hierarchical system according to Scollon&Scollon (2001). Even thoughCET-4and CET-6groups show no differences in terms of grammatical mistakes (bothaccounts for10.5%of the overall mistakes), the former made more pragmatic failuresthan the latter (47.3%>31.6%), out of them wrong address forms alone make up23.5%in CET-4groups and9.5%in CET-6groups respectively. 2. The learners’features were analyzed from the three perspectives: alerters, headacts and modifications, which make up request sequences.Among direct requests, hints and conventional indirect requests (three strategiesof head acts), learners prefer the last one, accounting for84.5%of the total requests.Researches on indirect requests show that the query preparatory is the learners’ priority.The most popular pattern for learners is the modal sequence----“modal verb+pron.+verb”, and favorite modal verbs are can/could, will/would, may. CET-4and CET-6groups made no difference on the choice of range of modal sequences when makingrequests, showing no pragma-linguistic development; their preference for modalsequence remains the same when dealing with different imposition of tasks withlisteners from different social distances in different situations, showing no socio-pragmatic development too.Learners from two groups tend to adopt the same kinds of alerters. Social powerseem to exert great influence on their preference of alerters in quantities as well as incategories. The higher the listeners’social status are, the greater the number of alertersbecome. Learners’ preference for alerters shows difference when they make requests indifferent politeness systems. The more familiar they are, the less alerters they turn to.With regards to internal modification, learners adopt five mitigating lexicons, ofwhich politeness marker “please” compose of80%, the subjectivezers10.5%,understaters, appealers and consultative devices altogether approximately8%. Thefrequency of the five mitigating lexicons shows differently in different politenesssystems. The imposition of tasks and learners’ differences among groups have no effecton learners’ range of internal modification.Five external modifications (supportive moves) are evidenced in learners’ corpus,that is, preparator, providing grounds, promise of reward, disarmer and impositionminimizer. Learners prefer “providing grounds”, alone accounting for87%and theother four14%. The frequency of the five supportive moves shows differently indifferent politeness systems. Power relations and social distances imposition of tasksmake an effect on learners’ choice of supportive moves but “providing grounds” arealways their priority; while they do not know turn to diverse supportive moves when dealing with varied imposition of tasks, and no significant differences are found in twogroups’ performance.3. The results of contrastive analysis shows that:1) Significant differences are found in the number of alerters between learners andnative speakers. There has been progressive decrease in the use of attention-gettersamong CET-4groups, CET-6group and native speakers; learners and native speakershave nearly nothing in common in the way to address others, and they show differencein the quantities of address forms.2) There is no striking difference between learners and native speakers in terms ofthree strategies related to head acts, namely, direct strategy, conventional indirectstrategy and hint. The subjects tend to use indirect strategy, accounting for over80%ofthe three strategies.As to the four types of query preparatory (conventional indirect strategies consistsof query preparatory and suggestory formula, and query preparatory is made up ofability, possibility, permission and willingness), three groups of the subjects preferability modal sequences, but they show different preference order concerning the otherthree types. About the ability and possibility query preparatory，two learners groupsperform almost the same as native speakers. As for permission，CET-4group showsgreat deviation from native-learner group. Regarding willingness, there is a greatvariation between CET-4group and the other two groups (CET-6group and nativespeakers group).When it comes to syntax, learners apply almost the same expressions as nativespeakers in the use of ability modal sequences and permission modal sequences. As forwillingness and possibility modal sequence, some patterns that have never been usedby learners can be found in native speakers’ corpus, most of them being more polite andmoderate. In addition, native speakers use many a special verb far beyond learner’sreach while learners focus on limited frequently-used ones.3) The contrastive study of modifications has been made in two aspects: internalmodifications and external modifications (or supportive moves). Regarding internal modification, native learners know to use mitigating syntacticforms with no appealers while learners only use mitigating lexicons instead. Learnersuse five types of mitigating lexicon altogether, the number of which approximatelyreaches native speakers’. But they show a bit difference on preference order----inaddition to their priority of politeness markers, native speakers’ second choice go to“understaters”, while learners stick to “subjectivezers”.Both learners and native speakers use five types of external modifications. A greatdifference appears in the number of external modifications adopted by learners andnative speakers. CET-6group uses “grounders” in a large number to make requests,varying considerably from the group of native speakers. Moreover,“a bit” isevidenced in native speakers’corpus.According to the five-phase division of pragmatic development proposed byKasper&Rose (2002:140), two phrases can be traced in learners corpus, namely thethird phase----unpacking formulas, which is featured by turning to indirect requestsand the fourth phase----pragmatic expansion, in which complicated syntactic formsare found and supportive moves come up.Two theoretical attempts are made in the process of explanations: one ismarkedness-errors hypothesis to explain in which situation learners make errors whenmaking requests, and the other is tri-parts of socio-pragmatic knowledge of foreignlanguage learners to explain why they transfer wrong address forms to foreign language.Out of five factors (available pragmatic input, classroom instruction, learners’level of proficiency, length of stay in target-language country and mother-tonguetransfer) involved, two are discussed in depth afterwards, that is, mother-tongue transferand the available pragmatic input.