2.4 Previous Empirical Studies of Acquisition of Advice-giving
2.4.2 Hinkel (1997)
Hinkel (1997) provided an initial study on advice giving by conducting two experimental tasks – a discourse completion test (DCT) and a multiple-choice questionnaire (MCQ). The focus of the study was on how the speakers of Chinese would respond to these two instruments that help elicit the participants’ perception and production of this speech act.
A lot of differences have been discussed in the literature on Chinese and English speakers’ behaviors of advice giving. Face-threatening acts (FTAs) vary from culture to culture, depending on the social distance between the speaker and the hearer, the power between the advisor and the addressee, and the appropriate strategies of giving advice.
Among the cultural groups Hinkel (1994) examined, the Korean participants deviated the most from the American native speakers, followed by the Japanese, Chinese, and Indonesian speakers. Chinese speakers regard advice giving as a way not only to build up personal rapport but also to bond with members in the group under the influence of Confucian and Taoist. On the other hand, giving advice is considered inappropriate and intrusive speech act to Americans. Since giving advice might intrude the hearer’s privacy, Americans tend to use more hedged advice and soften words in giving direct advice for fear that it might offend the hearer’s feeling. Besides, whether the speaker has the power to give advice is also taken into consideration. It seems that the acceptability of giving advice in Chinese and English is different based on the cultural norms and conceptual knowledge. Therefore, advice giving cannot be literally translated from Chinese to English without bearing the cultural and conceptual context in mind.
In the DCT, eight situations were designed to keep up with the earlier studies. There were four situations addressed to peers (equal status), and the others were to instructor (social dominant). In this task, only first person singular and second person singular pronoun were used. By avoiding using names, the participants were free to imagine the characters regardless of the relationships and intimacy between the hearer and the speaker. Avoiding explicit gender markers is also necessary because previous studies have found that males often see themselves as experts while females are less proficient and in need of advice. In this
study, eighty participants were recruited with forty native speakers of American English, and forty speakers of Taiwanese Chinese. Both the NS and NNS groups consisted of twenty males and twenty females, aged between eighteen and twenty-five. The NNSs were college students enrolled in various departments with a TOEFL mean score of 597, and their average residency was 1.6 years.
In data coding, only the responses that included imperatives and the modal verb
“should” without hedging were coded as direct advice. Responses containing expressions such as lexical hedges “maybe,” “I think,” impersonal constructions “it’s better…,” “it’s a
good idea…,” “it seemed that,” and questions like “Isn’t it better…” were coded as hedged
advice. As for indirect advice, only advice with more than one interactional intention without explicit and hedged advice was identified.The result of the DCT showed that the NSs preferred indirect advice to both peers and instructors, as in Table 2-4.
Table 2-4 The DCT Data from Hinkel (1997)3
Participants Direct Hedged Indirect Nothing
Peer American 26.25 % 30.625 % 40.625 % 2.5 %
Chinese 8.75 % 15.625 % 50 % 25.625 %
Instructor American 16.25 % 42.5 % 26.875 % 14.375 %
Chinese 2.5 % 20 % 58.125 % 19.375 %
However, in detailed analysis, the NSs occasionally chose direct advice with imperatives to status equal, and in many cases, offered hedged advice. On the other hand, the majority of the Chinese participants chose to give indirect advice to peers and hedged advice to instructors.
The bright spot of the DCT was that the NSs gave more direct advice than the Chinese
3 The results were taken from Hinkel (1997) and the table was listed by the researcher.
participants did, who had been noted to be more direct. This appeared to contrast with previous studies in that the NSs regarded giving advice as an FTA and thus gave less advice than the Chinese speakers do.
As for the MCQ, items were carefully selected as a choice that could represent direct, hedged, and indirect advice based on the categorization above. As for the design of the MCQ, eight situations were presented with three choices randomly arranged. In addition to direct, hedged, and indirect choices, the fourth option was an explicit choice for opting out all the other selections. To be consistent with the first experiment, eighty participants were recruited with forty Taiwanese Chinese (Mandarin) and forty native speakers of English. Each group contained twenty males and twenty females, aged between eighteen and twenty-six. The participants had been admitted to an American university, with a mean score of TOEFL of 593 and the mean of residency in U.S. was 1.9 years. The two experiments did not share the same participants, as showed in Table 2-5.
Table 2-5 The MCQ Data from Hinkel (1997)4
Participants Direct Hedged Indirect Nothing
Peer American 11.875 % 13.75 % 60.625 % 13.75 %
Chinese 18.125 % 51.875 % 26.875 % 3.125 %
Instructor American 8.75 % 12.5 % 56.875 % 21.875 %
Chinese 28.125 % 35.625 % 20 % 16.25 %
It was found that the NSs chose more indirect advice to both peers and instructors but direct advice was sometimes acceptable. However, the Chinese advisors preferred hedged advice to peers and instructors, and they were more direct compared with the NSs. The results
4 The results were taken from Hinkel (1997) and the table was listed by the researcher.
confirmed the findings of the earlier studies in that American English speakers regard advice as an FTA whereas Chinese speakers view advice giving as a way to show friendliness and to build up personal rapport.
It was obvious that the results of the MCQ mismatched with those of the DCT. If the data collected from the DCT were considered more typical than the MCQ, it might well be that advice-giving was viewed not as an FTA but as an appropriate conversational strategy in English-speaking societies; therefore, giving direct advice would not be taken as an impolite way of giving advice. Several explanations were given as follows: First, giving advice involved more pragmatically complex and situationally ambiguous concepts than the DCT was initially developed. Secondly, when completing the DCT, the participants did not have to face the social and psychological constraints that would actually happen in real-life conversation. In other words, they did not need to face the consequences of giving inappropriate advice. Thirdly, unlike the MCQ, which was used as a perception task, the DCT was employed as a production task. A perception task, to be more specific, involves syntactic as well as pragmatic features. The participants were more aware of the contextual and social variables of the speech act. Therefore, when responding to the MCQ, both NSs and NNSs were faced with a more comparable and balanced task. Furthermore, the NNSs’
behavior could be affected by additional factors. Researchers have noted that the DCT is used as a production task in written format, which gives participants a chance to give planned responses. Besides, responding to written tasks demands the NNSs more linguistic skills, and thus, made the DCT less assessable than the MCQ.
To sum up, the performances of the native speakers of American English and Chinese were significantly different on the DCTs and the MCQ. More the NSs than the Chinese
preferred direct and hedged advice in the DCT. On the contrary, the NSs favored indirect advice and selected fewer options with either direct or hedged advice than the Chinese did in the MCQ. The DCT data of this study appeared to counter with previous studies on the politeness strategy in giving advice which suggested that a DCT, as a written production instrument, should not be considered the best choice in eliciting data which involves actual speech acts that have distinct illocutionary forces in the participants’ L1 and L2. Nevertheless, a DCT can be used as a way to provide a natural resource for the options used in a MCQ to make the questionnaire more carefully constructed, and theoretically and pragmatically valid.