Abstract
While the number of studies on the pragmatic development of nonnative English speakers has been increasing, surprisingly little research has been conducted on the development of the ability of foreign language learners to perform the suggestion speech act, with even less taking Chinese EFL learners as the target group. The present study examines the development of Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic competence by investigating their performance of the suggestion speech act over time. Three sub-corpora representing three different periods of Chinese EFL learners’ performance were selected from the SECCL (Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners) to discover the changes in the use of linguistic formulae as well as suggestion strategies by Chinese EFL learners. Their performance was then compared with that of native English speakers to find out whether there was evidence of improvement across the years. The results show that (1) changes were taking place in the use of linguistic formulae and suggestion strategies by Chinese learners from 1997 to 2003, with greater changes taking place from the year 2000 to 2003, and (2) there was evidence of increasing similarity between Chinese learners’ performance of the suggestion speech acts and that of native English speakers. It can thus be concluded that Chinese learners’ pragmatic ability in English improved to some extent over the years of the study.
Highlights
The suggestion speech act—”an utterance that the speaker intends the hearer to perceive as a directive to do something that will be to the hearer’s benefit” (Banerjee & Carrell, 1988, p. 319), has been studied by different researchers in the past decades
2) What are the changes over time in the linguistic formulae of the suggestion speech act made by the Chinese EFL learners?
The present study examined the development of Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic competence through investigating their performance of the suggestion speech act over time
Summary
The suggestion speech act—”an utterance that the speaker intends the hearer to perceive as a directive to do something that will be to the hearer’s benefit” (Banerjee & Carrell, 1988, p. 319), has been studied by different researchers in the past decades. Since the mid-1990s, China has been carrying out reforms in foreign language education; many innovations have been made in English teaching and learning in China. With these changes, a question to be answered is whether Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic competence has improved . A question to be answered is whether Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic competence has improved To answer this question, the present study, based on corpus data, examines the changes that have taken place in Chinese EFL learners’ performance of the suggestion speech act in the past decade. The changes were examined against the performance of the suggestion speech act www.ccsenet.org/elt
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