美国大学生汉语“请求”言语行为能力研究

American college students’ requesting competence in Chinese as a foreign language

本文通过书面话语填充任务研究美国大学生汉语“请求”言语行为的能力,重点考察请求策略和外部修正策略的使用情况。对比发现学习者汉语请求能力较低,与汉语本族语者之间还存在不小的差距。一方面,学习者过度使用常规性间接请求策略,使请求的得体性受到影响;另一方面,在弱化请求行为的面子威胁效应方面,学习者外部修正策略的使用量要低于本族语者。在根据请求情境差异而调整请求策略和外部修正策略的使用方面,学习者与本族语者也存在不小的差距。

Using written Discourse Completion Task, this study examined requesting competence of American college students learning Chinese as a foreign language. In analyzing requesting behaviors, we focused particularly on the use of request strategy and external modification strategy. Comparing the practices of Chinese native speakers and the learners, we found that the learners’ competence in making requests in Chinese is generally low in that their use of request did not approximate much to the practice of native speakers. On the one hand, the learners overused conventional indirect strategies, which affected the appropriateness of their requesting behaviors; on the other hand, in mitigating the face-threatening effects of head act, the learners used far fewer external modification strategies than native Chinese speakers did. In addition, we found that learners’ competence in adjusting their strategy use in response to situational variations also lagged behind that of the native speaker.