Developing L2 Pragmatic Competence in Mandarin Chinese: Sequential Realization of Requests

Abstract

The present study explored the development of second language (L2) Chinese learners' ability to negotiate requests in interactions. It investigated the effect of proficiency on learners' use of request strategies and internal modifications and on their sequential realization of requests in L2 Chinese. Twenty‐four American English learners of L2 Mandarin Chinese at three different proficiency levels completed a three‐scenario role‐play task. The scenarios were kept low in imposition and social distance but variable in power relations. Each participant interacted with a native speaker interlocutor who assumed different roles in those scenarios. Baseline data were provided by 10 native speakers (NSs) of Chinese. A total of 102 role‐plays were coded for request strategies, internal modifications, and supportive moves, as well as the sequential placement of supportive moves in pre‐, insert, and postexpansions. Situational variations as reflected in role‐play production were considered alongside. The results showed that learners across proficiencies had the same range of pragmatic strategies as in NSs' repertoire, but they showed a general incompetence in employing internal modifications. Learners' ability to delay the requests improved with increasing proficiency, but learner production in general did not show the same level of situational variations as observed in the NS data.

Comparison between Chinese and Japanese Social Media Requests

“…The popularity of 'downtoners/understaters' and 'politeness markers' in the Chinese requests mirrors what has been previously found. For example, Su and Ren (2017) found that interrogatives and understaters were two popular modifiers in Chinese requests, followed by politeness markers. These three strategies were also the three most frequently used internal modifiers in the Chinese requests in the current study.…”

Proficiency and Preference Organization in Second Language Mandarin Chinese Refusals

“…Interactional research on L2 Mandarin remains rare. A small number of studies have investigated aspects of interaction, such as sequential organi-zation of request (Su & Ren, 2017) and discourse markers (Tsai & Chu, 2017), but no interactional studies of L2 Chinese refusals exist.…”

Trends in Usage-Based and Pragmatic Language Processing and Learning: A Bibliometric Analysis on Psycholinguistics and Second-Language Acquisition Studies

“…Authors from 48 countries contributed to the publication. The most productive countries (at least 10 articles) as the first author were the United States (211), England (45), China (34), Germany (33), Canada (33), Netherlands (20), Australia (19), France (19), Italy (15), Sweden (13), Belgium (12), Japan (12), and Korea (10), suggesting that the topics relevant to the pragmatic and usage-based language learning were interested by research groups with expertise in linguistics and/or psychology, and the languages of interest were more various. Besides the Indo-European languages such as English, German, French, and Italian, the East-Asian languages, in particular, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, are the popular languages of research.…”

“…The keywords that appeared at least five times among target publications in the topic of psycholinguistics and pragmatic and usage-based language processing highlighted the following related themes [Language (17), Comprehension (11), Psycholinguistics (10), Speech (8), Speakers (7), Acquisition (6), Information (5), Context (5), and Perception (5)] and methodology [Eye-movements (5) and Children (5)]. In the topic of usage-based and pragmatic language learning, the keywords that occurred at least 10 times among target publications represented the themes highlighting Second Language Acquisition (76) and L2 Acquisition (15), Bilingualism (56), Language Acquisition (23), Spanish (20), Pragmatics (17), Study Abroad (15), Language, (14), Working Memory (14), Second Language (13), English (13), Vocabulary (13), Second Language Learning (12), German (10), Interlanguage Pragmatics (10), and fMRI (10). The comparison of the keywords between these two topics clearly indicates a distinct trend of research interest and methodology of use in the field psycholinguistics and the field of second-language acquisition studies.…”

“…The use of virtual reality to create naturalistic scenarios will be a good complementary approach to test the impact of real-world social interaction on one's language processing and learning [8]. Of special interests is the testing of linguistic phenomena that can be addressed by different categories of communicative functions, such as indirectness (e.g., [9]), presupposition (e.g., [10]), speech/communicative acts (e.g., [11,12]), and politeness (e.g., [13][14][15]), among many others, on both well-represented, dominant languages and underrepresented, marginalized languages (e.g., east-Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean and their dialects) and on one's own and unfamiliar languages [16][17][18][19][20]. These topics are seldomly addressed in psycholinguistic literatures, and the experimental paradigms adapted to address these topics are rare in the secondlanguage acquisition literatures.…”