Developing Chinese Complimenting in a Study Abroad Program

Abstract

This article reports on an empirical study investigating what and how two college-level American learners of Mandarin Chinese developed their own understanding of the Chinese complimenting speech act while participating in a 7-week intensive language study abroad program. A case study approach was adopted with a focus on participants’ self-reflection data supplemented with the researcher’s observation data to unpack each participant’s pragmatic developmental process throughout the program. Guided by sociocultural theory, the study uncovered the dynamic, complex and highly individualized developmental process each participant experienced. The findings revealed that Chinese people’s special treatment of the two American students provided more constraints than opportunities for them to acquire Chinese complimenting. However, the learners’ own motivation and approaches to learning also significantly shaped their learning process and outcomes. Pedagogical suggestions for Chinese pragmatic development in study abroad contexts are provided.

Family’s Role in Achieving Language Affiliation among Children: A Comparative Study Applied to Some Families

“…Linguistic development is considered one of the social areas reflected in the psychological orientation of the creation of interpersonal social relationships, whether by using writing or speaking patterns. This is what Jin (2015) points out that linguistic development arises within human social relations. It is handled by semantic symbols such as the use of written or spoken language.…”

The Role of Learner Variables in Pragmatic Development during Study Abroad: A Systematic Review

“…It should be noted that learners' developed identities and their relationships with individuals' pragmatic development were influenced by a range of other factors such as learners' attitudes toward L2, L2 community (Liao 2009), and their internalized cultural values (Liu et al 2022). Motivation as an important affective factor was investigated in four studies in our pool and was found to have positive effects on learners' development (e.g., Inagaki 2019;Jin 2015;Kizu et al 2022). Furthermore, learners' attitudes toward the target communities, their culture, and languages were reported as another effective learner variable for pragmatic development in SA in four studies (e.g., Rafieyan 2016;Sánchez-Hernández and Alcón-Soler 2019b).…”

Learning Chinese in a study abroad context: The case of ritual congratulating

“…While we do not fully agree with this view, we believe that the criticism of Wang and Halenko (2022) is valid in that most scholars in the field have examined the acquisition of one particular speech act only. For example, Jin (2012, 2015) examined how foreign students develop skills in complimenting in Chinese study abroad programmes, Yang and Ke (2021) investigated how foreigners learn to realise requests and apologies in China and so on. We agree with Ren (2019) that speech acts need to be kept on the research agenda in the field, and as part of our methodology we pursue a bottom‐up take on speech acts.…”