Investigating longitudinal pragmatic development of complaints made by Chinese EFL learners

Abstract

Few studies have investigated the development of L2 complaints. This paper reports on a longitudinal study of L2 complaints produced by Chinese university English learners based on their performance of a discourse completion task consisting of 18 complaint scenarios in terms of power (+P, =P, −P) and social distance (−D, =D, +D), supplemented by a delayed retrospective verbal report. Data were collected twice, over two academic years. The results indicate that students in these two ‘phases’ showed broadly similar patterns of sociopragmatic competence in terms of their ability to calibrate complaints to complainees’ (addressees’) position on power and social distance continua. However, as to internal modifications, learners in Phase 2 used significantly more lexical and syntactic downgraders than in Phase 1 at all levels of power and social distance except for syntactic downgraders at +D and =D; they only used significantly more lexical upgraders at −D. As for external modifications, the findings also showed significantly different patterns in the use of pre-moves at all levels and post-moves at all levels except at −P. Increase of English proficiency and a certain degree of explicit pragmatic instruction may have contributed to Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic development. Implications for pragmatic instruction are also discussed.

A Video-driven Approach to Promoting Pragmatic Development in the Context of English as a Foreign Language

“…Surveying related ILP literature indicates that the complaint speech act, the focal point of this study, has not been as thoroughly tackled as other speech acts, particularly in countries where English is a foreign language . The current research has further documented that the speech act of complaint represents a communication difficulty for ESL/EFL learners in various aspects, such as formulas, strategy selection, the realization of the influence of contextual variables due to its complex nature, and lack of sufficient sociopragmatic knowledge among non-native speakers of English (Deveci, 2015;Li & Suleiman, 2017;Yuan & Zhang, 2018). Very few studies have been conducted on Saudi EFL students' performance of the speech act of complaint (Al-Shorman, 2016;Assallom, 2010;, and interventional pragmatic studies on complaints are still lacking.…”

Questionnaire Development and Validation of Interlanguage Pragmatic Instructional Approaches & Techniques in EFL Contexts

“…Compared to speakers with the same cultural orientations, non-native speakers are more likely to run into difficulties in intercultural communications, as they may come up with diverse interpretations and understandings of each other's discourse under the influence of their own cultural expectancies, values and norms (Yuan & Zhang, 2018). Accordingly, misapprehensions and even the collapse of interaction may happen due to a wide range of cultural conventions and norms that exist in the interlocutor's cultural repertoire.…”

Where there is suffering, there is sympathy: The speech act Sympathize in learning Chinese as a foreign language

“…are deployed to trigger rapport. In foreign language learning, the difficulty for learners to realize expressives appropriately in the target language has been broadly studied, for instance, with reference to Complain (e.g., Gallaher, 2014; Yuan & Zhang, 2018), Apologize (e.g., Barron, 2019; Liu & Ren, 2016), and Thank (e.g., Ren & Liu, 2021; Zhang, 2015).…”