1.1 Background and Motivation
Nonnative speakers (NNS) may acquire considerable grammatical or lexical knowledge of the target language but still fail to communicate effectively in certain situations due to their lack of pragmatic knowledge of the target language, that is, when to use what appropriately (Asher
& Simpson, 1994; Blum-Kulka, 1982, 1983; Cohen, 1996; Rintell, 1981; Thomas, 1983).
Intercultural miscommunication may occur when NNS rely on their pragmatic knowledge of their first language (L1) and negatively transfer it to their second language (L2) and then pragmatic failures occur (Takahashi, 1996; Thomas, 1983). Such kind of pragmatic failure may be more serious than grammatical or lexical deficiency because it may be attributed to rudeness or unfriendliness (Thomas, 1983) or even “racial prejudice” (Blum-Kulka, House &
Kasper, 1989:6). Since the concepts of communicative competence (Canale & Swain, 1980) and pragmatic competence (Bachman, 1990:87) were proposed in the 1980s, more and more researchers in the field of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) have been concerned about how learners’ pragmatic behaviors deviated from native speakers’ due to pragmatic transfer (Kasper, 1992) or cultural-specific interactional style (Kasper & Blum-Kulka, 1993). The Cross-cultural speech act realization project (CCSARP) (Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper, 1989) was among the earliest study in cross-cultural/interlanguage studies on the speech act of request and apology with the instrument Discourse Completion Tasks (DCT) in which various contextual factors that may affect request behaviors such as Degree of Imposition, Status, Distance, Right and Obligation, etc., were examined. Following the design and coding schema of CCSARP, many interlanguage studies were carried out on other speech acts such as apology (Meier, 1998; Holmes, 1990; Rose, 2000; Trosborg, 1995), expressing thanks (Aston, 1995; Eisenstein & Bodman, 1993), complaints (Boxer, 1993; Cohen & Olshtain, 1993; Olshtain & Weinbach, 1993; Tatsuki, 2000), compliments (Nelson, Bakary & Batal, 1996; Wolfson, 1989) and especially request (Barron, 2003; Blum-Kulka & House, 1989;
Blum-Kulka, 1989; Blum-Kulka, 1991; Cohen & Olshtain, 1993; Edmondson & House, 1991; Ellis, 1992; García, 1993; Hassall, 2001; Li, 2000; Rose, 1999, 2000; Schauer, 2004;
Suh, 1999; Takahashi, 1996; Trosborg, 1995; Upadhyay, 2003; Weizman, 1989;).
In the framework of request studies, the issue of universal or culture-specific politeness phenomenon with regard to the relationship between directness and politeness in request practice has been controversially debated theoretically in the speech act theory (Searle, 1976), politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Leech, 1983), cultural dimensions of individualism vs. collectivism (Byon, 2004) and empirically in many studies (Lee-Wong 1994;
Takahashi & Beebe 1993; Upadhyay, 2003; Yu 1999). Request by definition is a pre-event, face-threatening act (FTA) (Brown & Levinson, 1987), which “by their nature run contrary to the face wants of the addressee and/or of the speakers” (Brown & Levinson, ibid: 65). In order to mitigate the imposition caused by performing such an FTA, various politeness strategies are adopted (Brown & Levinson, 1987; Leech, 1983). According to Leech’s (1983) politeness theory and Brown & Levinson’s face-saving view of politeness, there is a linear relationship between directness and politeness—the more Indirect the strategy, the more polite the request behavior. However, such a claim was called into question in several studies on languages such as Chinese (Lee-Wong 1994, Yu 1999), Japanese (Takahashi &
Beebe 1993), Nepali (Upadhyay, 2003) etc.
The different interactional styles from culture to culture may account for the cultural-specific phenomenon of politeness related to the application of Direct strategies.
Hofstede (1984, 1997:55, 1991) proposed that people in collectivistic cultures such as Chinese differentiate the way of speaking to in-groups and out-groups (Triandis, 1994:186) while in the individualistic cultures as the US, the ways of speaking to others usually do not differ that obviously because in such cultures everyone is valued the same (Gudykunst &
Mody, 2002; Scollon & Scollon, 1995). Such a distinction is supported by several studies on the speech act of request such as Bond et al’s (1985) study on Hong Kong Chinese
(collectivism) vs. Americans (individualism), Fukushima’s (2000) on Japanese (collectivism) vs. the British (individualism), Holtgraves & Yang’s (1992) on Koreans (collectivism) vs.
Americans (individualism). For instance, comparing the use of Direct request strategies, EL1s prevailingly used less Direct strategies than Chinese did (Yu, 1999) since in Chinese society which emphasizes relational hierarchy (Chen & Chung, 1994), it is legitimate to use Direct strategies when speakers’ status is higher than hearers’ (Lee-Wong, 1994).
Many empirically studies (Barron, 2000; Blum-Kulka, 1982, 1983; Byon, 2004; Faerch
& Kasper, 1989; Hassall, 1997; Le Pair, 1996; Sasaki, 1998; Tim, 2001; Takahashi, 1995;
Takahashi & Dufon, 1989; Trosberg, 1995) have revealed that L2 learners who are not aware of pragmatic differences between L1 and L2 requestive behaviors may negatively transfer L1 request behaviors and interactional style to L2 and it led to communication breakdown.
Most of the studies on Chinese requests focused on Mandarin Chinese only (Hong, 1996;
Lee-Wong, 1994a, b; Zhang, 1995a, b) or on cross-cultural comparison such as Chinese vs.
English (Chung, 1995; Liao, 1997; Shih, 1999) and Chinese vs. German (Hong, 1993).
Thus far only one study was found which focuses on the interlanguage of request made by Chinese learners who learn English as a foreign language (Chinese EFLs) in Taiwan (Yu, 1999). In Yu’s (1999) study, the result indicated that native speakers of Chinese (CL1s) and Chinese EFLs significantly used more Direct strategies than EL1s did and Chinese EFLs negatively transferred their use of Direct strategies to L2. However, participants’ request performances were investigated in terms of the three main request strategies—Direct, Conventional Indirect, and Non-conventional Indirect strategies—but some of the cultural-specific requestive linguistic forms were not discussed. Besides, neither participants’ perception on cultural-specific weighting of contextual factors (Fraser, Rintell &
Walters; 1980; Kasper & Dahl, 1991; Spencer-Oatey, 1993) nor cultural variables such as individualism vs. collectivism (Gudykunst & Mody, 2002; Hofstede1991) and cultural-specific interactional style (Kim, 1993) which may affect their performances were
not specified. Thus, further studies on Chinese EFLs requests should be carried out to probe this interlanguage issue in terms of both perception and production with regard to both cultural and contextual factors.
1.2 Research Questions
The purpose of the study is to investigate the interlanguage of Chinese EFLs learners’
requestive behaviors in terms of both perception collected by Scaled-response questionnaires (SRQ) and production collected by DCT in order to answer the following research questions:
1. Are there similarities or differences between the Chinese L1s vs. English L1s speakers’ perception on request-eliciting situations with regard to a) the degree of imposition they feel; b) the degree of difficulty they feel; c) the likelihood that they will perform the act?
2. Are there similarities or differences between the CL1 vs. EL1 speakers with regard to how the contextual and cultural factors affect their choice of request strategies and if pragmatic transfers occur in Chinese EFLs’ choice of requestive strategies?
3. Are there similarities or differences between CL1s vs. EL1s with regard to how the contextual and cultural factors affect the amount and types of external modifications they use in making requests and if pragmatic transfers occur in Chinese EFLs’ use of external modifications?
1.3 Organization of the Thesis
The thesis consists of chapters as follows. Chapter 2 reviews both theoretical theories including speech act theory, politeness theory, interactional styles of individualistic versus collectivistic cultures, cross-cultural /interlanguage pragmatics and empirical studies on the speech act of request. The methodology, which consists of participants, the procedure of collecting data, and instruments comprising Scaled-response questionnaires (SRQ) and DCT
(Discourse Completion Task), is introduced in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 presents the main findings and discussions of SRQ and DCT. The comprehensive results are summarized and concluded in Chapter five.