A Study Of Korean Chinese Learners’ Request Speech Behaviour From The Perspective Of Intercultural Pragmatics

In today’s increasingly globalised world,communication has taken on new characteristics of multicultural interaction.As China’s economy develops and its international status increases,Chinese is increasingly used as a lingua franca in a pluralistic international environment.In this paper,we use questionnaires,role-plays and semi-structured interviews to study the request speech acts of 15 Korean learners of Chinese,one Russian learner of Chinese and one Vietnamese learner of Chinese in six situations with different social distances and power positions.The empirical study was conducted to analyse the pragmatic functional sentences,linguistic moderation and request strategies of Korean learners of Chinese as a lingua franca in intercultural contexts and the influence of different intercultural contexts on their language use.The study found that there were differences in the number of functional sentences that Korean learners chose to use in different intercultural contexts,but the types of sentences were similar.Compared to native speakers,Korean learners use a relatively homogeneous range of functional sentences,which are less diverse than native speakers,and are more likely to acquire superficial language markers.In terms of language moderation devices,Korean learners’ choices of language moderation devices vary in number but converge in type across different intercultural contexts.Compared to native speakers,Korean learners use language moderation less frequently.In terms of request strategies,the same type of request strategy is used more frequently in Korean-Russian intercultural contexts than in Korean-Vietnamese contexts in which the two parties are socially distant strangers,while the opposite is true in familiar contexts in which the two parties are socially distant,which is closely related to the socio-cultural background of the addressee.This is closely related to the socio-cultural background of the addressee.In choosing a specific request strategy,Korean learners adjusted and changed their request strategy according to the recipient’s response during the communication process,reflecting the process of constructing a common knowledge base and dynamically emerging meaning in cross-cultural communication,which is a manifestation of the active coordination of egoism and cooperation.Through a comparative analysis of Korean learners’ functional sentences,linguistic modifications and request strategies in different intercultural contexts,we find that Korean learners’ functional sentences and linguistic modifications are less influenced by different intercultural contexts and more influenced by their native language habits and their own linguistic level when making requests in specific contexts.The influence of different interactional contexts is most evident in the use of specific types and numbers of request strategies.Based on the above findings,the author proposes suggestions for the design of Chinese language teaching materials and classroom teaching,including improving the authenticity of the contexts in the teaching materials,highlighting the differences in language use between different contexts in which characters are influenced by factors such as power and status,and teaching Chinese in explicit contexts,creating realistic situations and increasing communicative training activities.