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The participants were also asked if they ever had experience living in or visiting an English speaking country, if so, their reasons and length of stay in the English speaking country.
For native English speakers, only age, gender and school major were asked in the personal data sheets.
Discourse Completion Task (DCT) questionnaire. Although using
ethnographic data collection, such as field notes, participating observation and tape/video recording, etc., could help researchers collect authentic language data, it was through elicitation method that researchers could obtain large quantity data of in a comparatively short amount of time. The advantage of applying elicitation methods was that through Discourse Completion Task (DCT) questionnaire, some variables could be controlled. In addition, as all data were written down in prints, discussion of the similarity and difference could be extracted much clearer and easier. The major function of the DCT was to elicit a number of data with certain controlled variables in a comparatively short period of time.
The open-ended DCT questionnaire was the most frequently and effectively used method in pragmatics research to elicit respondents’ utterances (e.g., Blum-Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989; Cohen & Olshtain, 1994). In this study, the DTC provided different contextual situations for respondents to respond if they were in the said case and the questionnaire provided self-extendable columns for respondents to fill in as much information as they would like to. In cases that participants preferred not to say anything, they could choose not to give any responses and keep their responses true to their speech style.
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In the DCT questionnaire, the scenarios were categorized by a number of episodes with a matrix of three variables: gender, social distance, and four indirect complaint (IC) themes from Boxer’s study (1993). The four themes were: (1) IC about oneself (self IC), (2) IC about others (other IC), (3) IC about situation with a personal focus (type A situation), and (4) IC about situation with impersonal focus (type B situation). The word “complain” was intentionally avoided throughout the
questionnaire to evade bias in participants’ response choices (Beebe & Takahashi, 1989).
Although validity of written DCT questionnaire had long been a topic of discussion, it was agreed to be a feasible tool to elicit a quantity of speech data in a comparatively short time. It might lack for authenticity in negotiation in one-turn imaginary DCT, yet Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) indicated that for research on cultural comparisons of certain speech acts, stereotyped language use and character of responses could still be observed in a written DCT. Hence, this study adopted a written DCT to obtain stereotyped responses of the respondents to the indirect complaints.
Questionnaire design. The questionnaire had two versions: one in English,
one in Chinese. For the Taiwanese group, a Chinese version of the questionnaire was used to acquire the original culture baseline information; for the native speakers of English in the US and the EFL in Taiwan, an English version of survey was applied to draw out the real language use of the targeted language. The contextual situations and the wording used in the questionnaires were proof-read by native speakers of Chinese and English respectively and later on by two other bilinguals to make sure that all
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situations could be easily understood and no confusion could be caused among participants of different cultures.
The fundamental concern of the questionnaire was that every situation was cross-culturally comparable and authentic not only for Taiwanese but for Americans alike, and no defects of this reason should be criticized.
The DCT questionnaire was composed of 24 contextual situations. The situations were to reveal a systematic variation of two contextual variables-the gender of the speaker and a set social distance between the speaker and the hearer. All
situational contexts were results of the interwoven of a gender and social distance with a theme of the indirect complaint (self IC, other IC, type A situation and type B situation) as categorized by Boxer (1993). Gender was binary, and social distance concept followed Wolfson’s Bulge theory (1988) was triplet (strangers, friends and intimates.) The theme was four kinds as categorized by Boxer (1993): self IC, other IC, type A situation and type B situation. These resulted in the construction of the contexts. In this study, genders and themes were controlled variables to ensure that there was no bias caused by them in responses. To be clear, they were not the topics of discussion in this study.
There were twenty-four contexts, being a result of 2 (gender) x 3 (social distance) x 4 (theme). In every context, the topic of the speech act in question was an issue of unpleasant situation easily detectable in school life. Every IC theme was designed to relate to a male or a female speaker of a designated social distance.
In order to make the questionnaire less heavy loading for respondents, the final layout was a result of 24 reshuffled situations arranged with a first priority of
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social distance and then with a consideration of a minimum page loads. A glance of the distribution of the questionnaire was spotlighted as Table 3-4.
Table 3.4 A glance of themes and topics of the 24 scenarios in the DTC
Question IC Code IC Theme Topic
Q-1 1s3 female stranger, SA Noise
Q-2 2s1 male stranger, self IC Late for meetings
Q-3 1s4 female stranger, SB Watching sad TV news while eating lunch
Q-4 1s1 female stranger, self IC Late for class
Q-5 2s3 male stranger, SA Rude or bad manners
Q-6 2s4 male stranger, SB Venting for unexpected queue Q-7 1s2 female stranger, other IC Venting for bad food
Q-8 2s2 male stranger, other IC Annoyed by out of focus Q&A Q-9 2f3 male friend, SA Noise made by strangers Q-10 2f2 male friend, other IC Angry for intrusive action Q-11 1f2 female friend, other IC Unhappy for indirect response Q-12 2f4 male friend, SB Impatient with internet access Q-13 1f1 female friend, self IC Upset with oneself
Q-14 1f3 female friend, SA Disgusting public toilet Q-15 2f1 male friend, self IC Upset with money matters Q-16 1f4 female friend, SB Unsatisfied with old dorms Q-17 2i1 male intimates, self IC Not prepared for exam
Q-18 2i2 male intimates, other IC Unpleasant smell of somebody Q-19 1i1 female intimates, self IC Lost controlling overeating Q-20 2i4 male intimates, SB Annoyingly hot weather Q-21 1i2 female intimates, other IC Annoyed by somebody Q-22 2i3 male intimates, SA Never ending labors Q-23 1i3 female intimates, SA Possible loss of a pen Q-24 1i4 female intimates, SB No clothes to wear For IC code:
(initial Arabic number) 1=female, 2=male;
(middle English letter) s=strangers, f =friends, i =intimates;
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3= personal focus (SA); 4= impersonal focus (SB)
Categorization of the strategy used. In Boxer’s (1993) research, all
responses were categorized into 6 types of strategies, and every response had only one place of fit. Discrimination of every strategy was crucial. Different from Boxer’s ethnographical approach (1993), this research used an open-ended DCT questionnaire.
In a lot of cases, written responses might carry certain similarity yet with subtle differences; it was therefore important to have clear definition of the characteristics of every response strategy to keep classification consistent through the study. The definition was discussed by the inter-raters and described as follows: