The Effect of Social Variables on English Address Forms

• Main Authors: Wei-Yi Hu, 胡唯毅
• Other Authors: Shu-Hung Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/29025475450357177085

碩士 === 國立臺北教育大學 === 兒童英語教育學系碩士班 === 98 === Address forms are affected by cultures and social values. This study aims to investigate how social variables affect address forms and how Taiwanese EFL college students and native speakers of American English apply English address forms under situations in which the occupation variable of the addressee and the setting variable were controlled. The subjects are 142 Taiwanese EFL college students and 26 native speakers of American English. The research instruments are a designed DCT (Discourse Completion Test) questionnaire of 12 situations and post-questionnaire interviews. Twelve questions set addressees with high and low social status in formal and informal settings. Referential statistics (A contingency table with a Fisher’s Exact Test) was mainly used to analyze the data, while transcriptions of interviews provided possible explanation. The research questions are listed below. 1. How do social variables, the occupation variable and the setting variable, affect speakers on English address forms choice? 2. Are the address forms used by Taiwanese EFL college students different from those used by native speakers of English? What and why are the differences? 3. Are there any special characteristics of the address forms used by EFL college students in Taiwan? Why? The results indicated that the occupation variable and the setting variable do affect English address form applications. People with high occupations received more title-based address forms, TLN (title + last name). However, people with low occupations received more name-based address forms, FN (First name). For the effects of formalities of the settings, all people received more FN in informal settings than in formal settings. This study also found that the occupation variable precedes the setting variable while address forms are applied. The main difference of the two groups’ address forms is that Taiwanese EFL college students tended to use Category 3 (Mister, Mr., Mr. + last name, Mr. + first name, Mr. + full name) to address people with low occupations while native speakers of American English used FN. There are three characteristics of address forms used by Taiwanese EFL college students. First, they used more occupational titles as address forms and they also applied more “Title alone”. Second, they used “Reverse forms”, which reflect the word order of Chinese language. Third, Taiwanese EFL college students used “Kinship terms” when there is definitely no real kin relationship between the addresser and the addressee. English learners and English teachers may want to include the addressing system of American English in the curriculum. Correct usages of American English address forms will avoid misunderstanding.