A Study Of Interlanguage Development Of Making Requests By American Learners Of Chinese

In line with recent focus on acquisitional issues in interlanguage pragmatics, the present cross-sectional study investigates the interlanguage development of making requests by 60 American learners of Chinese across low (G1), intermediate (G2), and high (G3) proficiency levels. Learner data was collected through Oral DCT (oral discourse completion task), and baseline data was collected among 20 native speakers of Chinese and 20 native speakers of American English. By concentrating on request strategies, this study investigates both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic development of learner requests. The results are twofold: (1) from the pragmalinguistic perspective, with increasing Chinese proficiency, American learners increased their use of the conventionally indirect strategy and decreased the use of the direct strategy, while the use of the non-conventionally indirect strategy remained at a low level. Comparison with native speaker data revealed that learners'overall pragmalinguistic development was digressive, moving toward English native speaker's norm; (2) from the sociopragmatic perspective, only advanced learners demonstrated target-like contextual variation of both direct and conventionally indirect strategies to the power variable, and the target-like contextual variation only applies to low-imposition situations. In addition, learners across three proficiency levels demonstrated more target-like tendency of contextual variation in situations with low impositions and equal power status than in situations with high imposition and unequal power status. Explanations of the observed phenomena are offered, and the thesis ends with some theoretical and pedagogical implications.