Kazakhstan Students Spoken Chinese Request - Response To The Speech Act Pragmatic Failure

The present study has systematically set out to emamine the overall trend of pragmatic failures committed by overseas students from Kazakhstan at lexical, grammatical and discourse levels in Mandarin in making requests and responses and the influence of different sizes of imposition on their pragmatic failures based upon Thomas'fundamental theory of pragmatic failure and Austin's Speech Act Theory. Practically speaking this study may put forward some practical suggestions for the local government in forming the Chinese-as-the-second-language teaching policies for overseas students, the popularization of Mandarin Chinese and the cross-cultural communication. This study, methodologically speaking, adopts the research instruments of literature review, questionnaire and role-play.Findings reveal that 120 low, intermediate and advanced overseas students from Kazakhstan are making pragmatic failures of the speech act of request and response at the lexical, grammatical and discourse levels, there are not any failures at the sequence of alter at all. The failures are scattered around the sequences of head acts and supportive moves. While the failures at the sequence of head acts take up the highest position, occurring more than 136, >136, but within 212,﹤212. The failures at the sequence of supportive moves at the three levels of lexicon, grammar and discourse are less than the head acts and more than 40, >40, but within 212,﹤212 ranking the second. From the level of lexicon to discourse, the pragmatic failures those 120 overseas students from Kazakhstan are making are fewer, indicating that the subjects rarely use supportive moves in making requests and perceive the expression of making requests as a formula, deviating from native requesting ways.This study also shows that the pragmatic failures have something to do with the sizes of imposition and the lengths of learning Chinese. Firstly, generally speaking, pragmatic failures among three groups are significantly different. What's more, low level and the intermediate level are significantly different and the low level and the advanced level are significantly different too, but the correlation between intermediate level and the advanced level are not significantly different. Secondly, low group in three different degrees of imposition always tops the other two groups. In the eyes of this group, their requesting patterns are keeping the same way: simply making a request without considering the requesting strategies and the contextual knowledge. Therefore, they commit the sociopragmatic failure. One of the sociopragmatic failures stems from the mis-judgement of the size of imposition. This phenomenon has something to do with their relatively shorter lengths of Chinese leraning. One final illustration of sociopragmatic failure may be provided by the frequent phenomenon of a foreign speaker's judging relative power or social distance different from a native speaker.