GENDER DIFFERENCES IN CHINESE SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS’ USE OF DISAGREEMENT STRATEGIES

Abstract

To date, the studies on disagreement strategies in Chinese mainly focus on adults, and relevant research on senior high school students is rare. This study intends to explore gender differences in Chinese senior high school students’ use of disagreement strategies. By adopting a discourse completion task (DCT) and modified Yang’s classification of disagreement strategies (2015), we designed an open-ended questionnaire survey of 12 situations with three social factors (social distance, social status, and sex of hearer) which was distributed among 100 Chinese senior high school students. Then we analyzed all the 96 valid survey responses and did a T-test. The results show that the distribution of disagreement strategies is uneven, with Softened Disagreement Strategy (SDS, 96.96%) dominating, and that there exist significant gender differences in Chinese senior high school students’ use of Neither Softened Nor Strengthened Disagreement Strategy (NSNSDS) (p=0.0330.05). The present study contributes to the understanding of disagreement and gender differences in disagreement strategies and offers implications to communication and EFL teaching for Chinese teenagers.