A Study On The Acquisition Of Disagreement Speech Acts By Advanced Chinese Learners

In recent years,the development of learners’ pragmatic competence has received increasing attention as academics pay attention to the appropriateness of second language learners’ oral communication.Disagreement,however,as a common phenomenon in daily communication,have not attracted much attention in the field of Chinese second language acquisition.Disagreement refers to the verbal confrontation or dispute between speakers due to discrepancy in opinion.Since disagreement is essentially a face-threatening act,speakers often use a variety of linguistic modifications to moderate the tone and maintain the hearer’s face in order to ensure smooth communication.This paper uses two Chinese talk shows to build a corpus of Chinese Disagreement speech acts,and examines the use of disagreement strategies by advanced Chinese learners in the context of oral communication,and further compares them with the corpus of native Chinese speakers.The results of the study found that the development of learners’ pragmatic skills did not fully coincide with the development of overall language skills.The findings revealed that compared to native speakers,Chinese learners used disagreement not softened nor strengthened and aggravated disagreement strategies more often than native speakers,while softened disagreement strategies were used significantly less often than native speakers.It causes advanced Chinese learners more direct in expressing their disagreement,which tends to damage the face of the hearers.By comparing the use of internal modifications,it is found that Chinese learners tended to both overuse and underuse them,and that their choice of disagreement strategies was characterized by negative transfer of native language,homogeneous and programmatic features,and also inappropriate usage.Specifically,in the softened disagreement strategies,advanced learners used partial agreement,clarifying questions,humor,honorifics,elaborating definitions,and moderated tone auxiliaries significantly less frequently than native speakers,and also used softened strategies less abundantly than native speakers.Among the disagreement not softened nor strengthened strategies,the use of contradictory statements,especially marked contradictory statements was significantly higher than that of native Chinese speakers.Among the aggravated strategies,the use of rhetorical questions,metapragmatic comment,personal "you" with accusatory or imperative force,insulting language,and augmented modal adverbs was significantly higher than that of native Chinese speakers.Accordingly,this study suggests improvements for teachers’ teaching,textbooks,and syllabus.Teachers should pay attention to the importance of explicit pragmatic teaching of disagreement speech acts,and strive to continuously create a variety of language exposure opportunities for learners,focusing on developing students’pragmatic awareness of the appropriate use of force modifiers.The textbook should incorporate various forms of disagreement strategies,improve the presentation of examples,and increase the discourse annotations of examples.The syllabus should be compiled to explain different categories of disagreement strategies and reflect the systematic and instructive nature of the syllabus.