1 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ---------- NGUYỄN THỊ TỐ LOAN A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY ON PRAGMATIC TRANSFER IN COMPLIMENT RESPONSES BY LEARNERS OF ENGLISH AT HUNG VUONG UNIVERSITY (Nghiên cứu giao văn hoá về chuyển di ngữ dụng học trong cách đáp lại lời khen của sinh viên học tiếng Anh ở trường Đại học Hùng Vương) M. Minor Thesis Field: English Linguistics Code: 60.15 HANOI – 2010 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 2 VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST – GRADUATE STUDIES ---------- NGUYỄN THỊ TỐ LOAN A CROSS-CULTURAL STUDY ON PRAGMATIC TRANSFER IN COMPLIMENT RESPONSES BY LEARNERS OF ENGLISH AT HUNG VUONG UNIVERSITY (Nghiên cứu giao văn hoá về chuyển di ngữ dụng học trong cách đáp lại lời khen của sinh viên học tiếng Anh ở trường Đại học Hùng Vương) Field: ENGLISH LINGUISTICS Code: 60.15 Supervisor: ĐỖ THỊ MAI THANH, M.A HANOI – 2010 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Declaration. iii Table of contents. iv List of abbreviations.
vi List of tables, figures and appendices……………. vii PART A: INTRODUCTION. Background of the study. Significance of the study.
Aim of the study. Scope of the study. Design of the study. 5 CHAPTER 1: LITERATURE REVIEW.
Pragmatics and speech act. Theories of politeness. Interlanguage pragmatics and communicative competence. The speech acts of compliment and responding to compliments.
The speech acts of compliment. Previous studies of pragmatic transfer in responding to compliments……. 13 CHAPTER 2: THE STUDY. Instruments and procedures.
16 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail. Administration of the questionnaires. Data collection procedures. Coding and data analysis.
19 CHAPTER 3: FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION. Pragmatic strategies used in responding to compliments. Strategies from acceptance to denial ………. Strategies along the avoidance continuum ………………………………… 22 3.
Frequency of pragmatic strategies used in responding to compliments by all groups. A comparison of the pragmatic strategies used among the three groups. Similarities in the frequency of CR strategy use between the HVU learners of English and NV groups ……………………………………………………………. Differences in the frequency of CR strategy use between the HVU learners of English and NE groups.
The occurrences of pragmatic transfer. Limitations of the study. Suggestions for further research. III LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 8 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS Throughout this work, abbreviations and symbols are adopted for the description of recurrent concepts and speech features.
CRs = Compliment Responses DCTs = Discourse Completion Tests EFL = English as a Foreign Language FTA = Face-threatening Act HVU = Hung Vuong University IELTS = International English Language Testing System ILP = Interlanguage pragmatics L1 = First Language L2 = Second Language NE = English Native Speakers NV = Vietnamese Native Speakers NNs = Native Speakers NNs = Non - native Speakers Ss = Students TL = Target Language UQ = University of Queensland LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 9 LIST OF TABLES, FIGURES AND APENDICES Tables Table 1.1 Compliment response strategies (Herbert, 1986) 12 Table 1.2 Summary of interlanguage pragmatics studies of CRs 13 Table 2.1 Compliment topic & content 17 Table 3.1 Frequency of pragmatic strategies used in responding to 24 compliments by all groups Table 3.2 Statistical comparison of frequency of CR strategy use between the 26 HVUE and NV groups (based on the number of students who used/did not use a specific CR strategy in each group) Table 3.3 Statistical comparison of frequency of CR strategy use between the 28 HVUE and NE groups (based on the number of students who used/did not use a specific CR strategy in each group) Figures Figure 1.1 Possible strategies for doing FTAs (Brown & Levinson, 1987) 8 Figure 3.1 Frequency of use of CR strategies on the acceptance to denial 26 continuum by the HVUE and NV groups (based on the number of students who used a specific CR strategy in each group) Figure 3.2 Frequency of use of CR strategies on the avoidance continuum by 27 the HVUE and NV groups (based on the number of students who used a specific CR strategy in each group) Figure 3.3 Frequency of use of CR strategies on the acceptance to denial 29 continuum by the HVUE and NE groups (based on the number of students who used a specific CR strategy in each group) Figure 3.4 Frequency of use of CR strategies on the avoidance continuum by 29 the HVUE and NV groups (based on the number of students who used a specific CR strategy in each group) Figure 3.5 Variation in the use of CR strategies on the acceptance to denial 31 continuum by the HVUE, NE and NV groups (based on the number of CRs containing each strategy in each group) Figure 3.6 Variation in the use of CR strategies on the avoidance continuum by 31 LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 10 the HVUE, NE and NV groups (based on the number of CRs containing each strategy in each group) Appendices Appendix 1 Discourse Completion Tests (English version) I Appendix 2 Discourse Completion Tests (Vietnamese version) III LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 11 PART A: INTRODUCTION This initial part outlines the research problem and background of the study as well as its scope and significance. More importantly, the aims and objectives are highlighted with two research questions to provide guidelines for the whole research. Background of the study In the Gulf war, two ladies, an American and a Kuwaiti, met. The American expressed her admiration of the Kuwaiti‟s necklace, and being polite, the Kuwaiti lady responded to this admiration with a common response, “It is yours”.
The American took this response literally and accepted the necklace as a gift. She believed that the Kuwaiti lady was sincere in her offer and did not understand that this was only a customary response and should not be taken literally. What the Kuwaiti lady said was only a sign of politeness, generosity and hospitality. The appropriate response would have been to say, “Thank you”; not to take the jewelry, of course.
This misinterpretation happened because these ladies belonged to different cultures with different traditions, thus have different frames of reference. Communicating with speakers of other languages is a complex behavior that requires both linguistic and pragmatic competence. Whether we speak in a first or second language, we are influenced by socio-cultural norms and constraints that affect the way we communicate. In practice, many language learners have experienced the loss of how to do in actual intercultural communication though they know perfectly well the phonological, morphological, syntactic rules, and the semantic meaning of every word and sentence.
Looking back on the history of English teaching in Hung Vuong University (HVU), Phu Tho, Vietnam, teachers‟ attention tends to focus on linguistic knowledge, while pragmatic information is not usually stressed. Therefore, most students here are good at reading and writing with sufficient knowledge of English grammar and vocabulary and able to score high in tests, but they fail in communicating with foreigners. In these cases, the mistakes they commit are not verbal or grammatical; instead, these mistakes occur because certain social conventions or rules of interpersonal relationship have been violated. These kinds of mistakes are defined as pragmatic failure.
Pragmatic failure may cause misunderstanding, and thus sets up barriers to successful cross-cultural communication. Some of the foreign volunteer teachers at HVU said to me that sometimes they might consider the way the students respond to compliments offending or bizarre, because they LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 12 understood only the words without the cultural rules that govern them. The problem here is that HVU learners of English do not produce target-like compliment responses. Hence, this study aims at finding out how HVU learners of English produce compliment responses in English and whether pragmatic transfer can occur.
My interest in the issue of responses to compliments derives mainly from my teaching and supervising experiences. To my knowledge, so far, there has been no systematic research carried out on the pragmatic failures made by HVU students in the process of English learning and cross-cultural communication. Hence, an elaborate study should be implemented in order to develop students‟ pragmatic competence as well as teachers‟ capability in cultivating students‟ communicative competence. Significance of the study It is hoped that this study might be of theoretical and pedagogical importance.
Theoretically, it might shed light on the communicative strategies inherent in compliment responses among HVU EFL learners. Most of previous studies focused their research on compliments and compliment-responses in general but rarely on EFL students‟ complimenting behaviors. What is more, this study might be included within the body of literature that has shown the extension of research of pragmatic competence and its relationship to foreign language learning and teaching. It might support the assumption that ignorance of cross-cultural differences might cause potential breakdown in communication.
Such research might enable teachers to show points of similarity and difference to students in order to use positive but avoid negative transfer which might lead to pragmatic failure. On the practical side, this study might provide practical insights into whether there is need for further pedagogical training of learners of English so that they may acquire pragmatic competence in responding to compliments in English. If the results of the study indicate such a need, learners might be given specific instructions to help them respond to compliments appropriately. The findings of this study could be of great help in the teaching and learning of foreign languages in relation to culture, like teaching Vietnamese to speakers of other languages or teaching English to Vietnamese at HVU as well as in developing a syllabus for courses.
LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 13 To sum up, gaining knowledge of native Vietnamese and English speakers‟ response strategies to compliments may enhance our ability to communicate effectively in a cross- cultural setting without facing any communication breakdowns. Aims of the study The present research is an effort: 1) to investigate what typical response strategies to compliments are used; and 2) to compare the response strategies to compliments as used by English native speakers (NE), Vietnamese native speakers (NV), and HVU English learners (HVUE) in terms of the frequency of use of the pragmatic strategies. The possibilities of pragmatic transfer effecting of the cross-cultural competency in the responses of HVU EFL learners to baseline responses by English and Vietnamese natives are also examined. More specifically, the study is designed to answer the following two questions: 1.
Are there any similarities and differences in strategy use of compliment responses among those groups? 2. Is there pragmatic transfer in the communicative act of responding to compliments in English by HVU learners of English? If there is a transfer, what is transferred? The research questions are answered through the investigation of the following two assumptions: 1. There are significant differences and similarities in strategy use in responding to compliments by HVU learners of English as a foreign language and NE and NV speakers. There is pragmatic transfer in the communicative act of responding to compliments in English by HVU learners of English.
What is transferred can be explained by finding out the similarities in strategy use in responding to compliments by HVU learners of English as a foreign language and native Vietnamese speakers and the differences between HVU learners of English as a foreign language and native English speakers‟ response choices. Scope of the study The present thesis study focuses on HVU EFL learners who are taking IELTS class to prepare for a post-graduate course in an English-speaking country. Due to the limited numbers of students, the limited range of speakers and speech situations, we cannot claim LUAN VAN CHAT LUONG download : add luanvanchat@agmail.com 14 that the results of this study show the whole picture of compliment response interaction in Vietnamese EFL learners.