Chinese Students' Gender Differences In Pragmatic Failures Of English Requests

The purpose of the study is to investigate gender difference in pragmatic failures of making English requests among Chinese university students based on theoretical issues of Thomas'research on pragmatic failure, Speech Act Theory, and Politeness Theory.Data are obtained from four groups of participants: 37 female and 30 male English-major Chinese EFL third year students in Xinjiang University, from whom comparative data are obtained; 12 female and 8 male American native speakers, from whom baseline data are obtained.Data for analysis are collected with the instrument of Discourse Completion Task (DCT) varied with contextual factors of Degree of imposition, status, distance, gender and age. Responses of productions are coded into three parts: the request strategies consisting of direct request, conventional indirect request and non-conventional indirect request, alerters and supportive moves according to the coding schema of CCSARP (Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper, 1989). The percentage statistics, chi-square test and parameter estimate in SPSS 13.0 are used to analyze the collected data. The results of the study show that firstly, both male and female students commit pragmatic failures significantly in using the request strategies, but there is no significant difference in their pragmatic failures. The pragmatic failures of Chinese female in request strategies lie in the fact that they use more conventionally indirect request in lower degree of imposition than American female while Chinese male commit pragmatic failures in that they use more direct request to more familiar hearers than American male. Secondly, Chinese male and female students use more alerters than American male and female, but female students commit more pragmatic failures. To be specific, Chinese female students use more alerters to higher status hearers than American female while Chinese male students use more alerters to less familiar hearers than American male. Thirdly, Chinese male and female students use fewer supportive moves than American male and female, but female students commit more pragmatic failures. To be specific, Chinese female students use fewer supportive moves in general than American female while Chinese male students use more to female hearers than American male. The analysis shows that Chinese students'pragmatic failures on request are mainly caused by cultural differences, the transference of L1's pragmatic rule and teaching reasons. Since making appropriate requests is markedly influenced by native language and culture, an understanding of cultural differences between Eastern and Western cultures and gender approaches will help Chinese EFL learners make requests appropriately, improve the cross-cultural pragmatic competence and enhance the possibility of successful communication.