Making Requests by Chinese EFL Learners: (207 Pragmatics & Beyond New Series)

Requests, a speech act people frequently use to perform everyday social interactions, have attracted particular attention in politeness theories, pragmatics, and second language acquisition. This book looks at request behaviours in a significant EFL population – Chinese-speaking learners of English. It will draw on recent literature, such as politeness theories and cognitive models for interlanguage pragmatics development, as well as placing special emphasis on situational context and formulaic language to provide a more fine-grained investigation. A range of request scenarios has been specifically designed for this project, from common service encounters to highly face-threatening situations such as borrowing money and asking a favour of police officer. Our findings on Chinese-style pragmatic behaviours and patterns of pragmatic development will be of value to cross-cultural pragmatics researchers, TESOL professionals, and university students with an interest in this area of study.

Table of Contents:
1. Preface; 2. List of tables; 3. List of abbreviations; 4. Acknowledgements; 5. 1. Introduction; 6. 2. Interlanguage pragmatics: A critical review; 7. 3. Method; 8. 4. Strategy use; 9. 5. Formulaic expressions; 10. 6. Internal modifications; 11. 7. External modifications and utterance length; 12. 8. How Chinese EFL learners make requests: Overall pattern & implications; 13. 9. Conclusion; 14. Notes; 15. References; 16. Appendix 1. The discourse completion tasks; 17. Appendix 2. Strategy types by scenario; 18. Appendix 3. Formulaic expressions by scenario; 19. Index

Review :
This richly documented study has important implications for intercultural pragmatics, both in terms of competence in question formulation and management, and from the point of view of developmental and acquisitional factors in second language and second language-pragmatic pedagogy. It is also highly pertinent to the growing fields of politeness studies. It is a virtue of Wang’s book that he builds his research on the basis of a solid grasp of previous research on interlanguage pragmatics. This allows him to provide a concise review of and critical view on the research background. The clear and step-by-step analysis of the request samples provides the reader with a deep understanding of request strategies in Chinese EFL learners. At the same time, the author does not lose sight of the L1 and L2 comparison. Wang has genuine empirical evidence for the usefulness of the context-based and formulae-based approaches and contributes a study for cross-cultural pragmatics, politeness and language pedagogy. In this monograph, Vincent Wang pins down the complex issue of pragmatic competence to its one important aspect: request making, which has a close bearing on L2 pedagogy and intercultural communication. The groups of subjects investigated and the scenarios creatively designed are essential, sociolinguistically speaking, to convincingly generate both the quantitative and qualitative findings of the research. The insightful, soundly theory-based as well as in-depth analysis is another prominent indication of academic values of the book. Vincent Wang’s exploration of the way Chinese learners of English make requests in different scenarios is an excellent addition to the field of Interlanguage Pragmatics. Based on careful analyses of request productions by two different learner groups, this study documents the importance of a context-specific, socially situated approach to L2 learning and the crucial role formulaic expressions seem to play in the development of pragmatic competence in English as a foreign language.