An Exploratory Cross-sectional Study Of Requests By Second Language Learners Of Chinese

This paper reports the results of an exploratory cross-sectional study of requests by second language learners of Chinese who completed a free discourse completion questionnaire designed to elicit request performance. Results show that all learner subjects, despite of their Chinese proficiency, can correctly express the content of requests and their choice of request strategy, polite markers, supportive moves and alerters become more native-like with the development of their language proficiency.However, learners' requests still display clear L2 learners' characteristics: underuse of direct request strategy, overuse of query strategy, overuse of polite words and verbose. This is due to multi-factors as the following: negative transfer of learners' mother languages, the influence of the materials in textbooks and learners' lack of Chinese pragmatic knowledge.In one word, learners' pragmatic competence is constrained by their Chinese proficiency. Choice and control over pragmatic knowledge already gained plays an important role in the development of learners' L2 pragmatic competence.This research also has some practical pedagogical value. Firstly, TCSL textbooks must provide authentic materials. Secondly, while teaching language structure teachers should instruct Chinese pragmatic knowledge to help the adult learners to establish Chinese pragmatic rules system. At last, in order to enrich language input we can encourage learners to actively communicate with Chinese people to get more real oral communication opportunities.