A Survey Of Chinese Students' Requesting Speech Acts

The language communicative competence refers to the learners’ ability to communicate in the target language correctly;it’s very important to learners and pragmatic competence is an important part of language communication ability.Foreign scholars dwelled on it early,and there are a lot of book and paper about this aspect.In recent years,Chinese scholars began to gradually realize the importance of language learners’ pragmatic competence,related research began to flourish,and teachers who are teaching Chinese as a second language pay more and more attention to students’ pragmatic competence development.This paper selects one of the speech acts----request as the breakthrough point.Through the analysis of foreign students’ request performance,and comparison with Chinese native speakers,this paper tried to examine foreign students’ pragmatic competence.This paper mainly discusses the following two questions:First,as for the request performance we compare participants with Chinese people,intermediate foreign students and foreign students respectively;in addition,we analyze the pragmatic features of their request performance in Chinese,the distribution of their request strategies and external modification strategies;and finally,we explore the development of pragmatic competence of foreign students.Second,what implications can survey results and conclusions have for teaching Chinese as a foreign language?This paper reports the results of an exploratory cross-sectional study of requests by second language learners of Chinese who completed a free discourage completion questionnaire designed to elicit performance,and compares and analyzes their performance with that of native speakers of Chinese.Results show that:1.Intermediate and high learners’ Chinese language level is higher,and they have a certain Chinese pragmatic competence at the same time.2.The pragmatic competence of foreign students is not high compared with that of native Chinese,and pragmatic competence and language ability are not positively correlated,namely foreign students with high level of language proficiency don’t necessarily have high pragmatic competence.We conclude that causes of foreign students’ low pragmatic competence in Chinese are: 1)they are short of Chinese culture knowledge;2)they transfer their native language and culture into Chinese;and 3)there are some drawbacks in TCSL textbook,and teachers don’t attach enough importance to the cultivation of students’ pragmatic competence.According to the characteristics of the students and in order to implement the speech act of Chinese request,we hold that:In terms of textbook compilation,we should pay attention to selecting some authentic,accurate,comprehensive and representative Chinese data;In terms of teaching methodology,teachers should revise or alter their ongoing but inappropriate approaches,and pay attention to cultivating students’ pragmatic competence.For example,teachers should try to provide students with authentic Chinese and its context;Teachers should be able to supply students with the necessary pragmatic knowledge;Teachers should provide appropriate pragmatic knowledge for students to practice so as to consolidate their knowledge;Teachers shall be able to offer periodical feedback to the students;In terms of students’ learing,we believe that students should make full use of Chinese context while learning Chinese,and often communicate with Chinese people and know Chinese culture,and also reflect constantly on their process of learning Chinese.