Year: 2016
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: The field of interlanguage pragmatics has burgeoned since late 20th century. Requests, as a part of speech act theory, have been investigated by many scholars. This cross-sectional study explores the acquisition of pragmatics of Chinese learners of Japanese in foreign language contexts (JFL) by examining their request usages, which incorporates pragmatic transfer as a tool to interpret data. Discourse completion task (DCT) questionnaires were distributed to first-year, second-year and fourth-year Japanese learners at a university in China, as well as to native speakers in the U.S. to elicit requests. Requests were analyzed according to the following six categories: perspectives, speech levels, strategies, syntactic downgraders, semantic downgraders, and supportive moves. Based on data analysis, the preliminary findings are: 1) Significant improvement from the first- year group to the second-year group can be observed. 2) In general, the fourth-year group performed similar to or less native-like than the second-year group. 3) Regardless of the advancement, a gap still exists between learners and native speakers regarding pragmatics proficiency. The study not only sheds light on the evolution of learners’ interlanguage from a perspective of pragmatics, but can also reveal part of the current teaching and learning situations of Japanese pragmatics at universities in China. By discussing learners' success and potential areas that need developing, the findings could provide some meaningful implications for Japanese pedagogy.
Author: Yuning Cao
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Quality education
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2474130863