| Summary: | 博士 === 高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 98 === The purpose of the present study is to explore the interlanguage performance of 30 Taiwanese advanced EFL learners (EFL-A henceforth) and 30 intermediate ones (EFL-I thereafter) by comparing their oral disagreement behavior with that of 31 native speakers of American English (ENS henceforth) and 33 native speakers of Chinese (CNS thereafter) who serve as baselines. Detailed analyses of the four groups’ employment of different strategy types, the mean length of oral production and the use of paralinguistic features reveal important information among different groups’ communicative styles, which not only sheds light on the phenomenon of transfer effects, but also gives us insights into understanding different cultural values, norms, and assumptions concerning interpersonal use of disagreement speech act in a Western and a non-Western language (i.e., American English and Chinese respectively).
With regard to variables investigated in the present study, they are composed of relative social status between the subjects and their interlocutors, (i.e., higher or lower), the gender of the subjects, the gender of the subjects’ interlocutors, and the English proficiency levels of Taiwanese English learners (EFL henceforth). Concerning the data elicitation method employed in the present study in obtaining oral production from the subjects, it is a web-based simulated role-play task. As for the major findings in the preset study, they are summarized as follows.
To begin with, firstly, irrespective of the social status and gender difference, CNS tends to be the most direct group and is followed by ENS, EFL-A and then EFl-I. This reveals that CNS subjects in Taiwan have become bolder over these decades due to the rapid social change under the influence of Western culture, the educational reform in the higher education, Taiwan’s transformation from a collectivist to an individualist society, and the shift from extended to nuclear family arrangement in Taiwan, etc. Secondly, EFL-A tends to have comparable mean lengths with ENS and EFL-I has the lowest mean length. This is due to the fact that EFL-A’s linguistic competence is higher than EFL-I. In addition, EFL-I may find it safer to produce shorter utterances to evade any mistakes or miscommunication from occurring. Thirdly, CNS and ENS have the highest counts in the use of laugh quality. This phenomenon is understandable as ENS and CNS are native speakers of their languages and they have a better control on how and when to use this feature. As for EFL-A and EFL-I, the lower frequency of laugh quality may be due to the fact that they are aware that laugh quality needs to be tended with care. If it is not used in the right place at the right time with the right people, the user of this feature, instead of reaching the effect of lightening the atmosphere, can be interpreted as being cynical or ironic. This may accounts for EFL’s lower frequencies in the use of this feature, in particular for EFL-I. Fourthly, with respect to emphasized tone, on the whole, all the four groups have high frequencies in the use of this feature. In particular, CNS has the highest count, followed by ENS, EFL-A and then EFL-I. This may be due to the fact that the use of this feature does not require linguistic competence; thus, all four groups tend to make good use of this feature to make their utterances more effective and powerful.
With respect to the use of the modifiers in the supportive move(s) by the four groups, on the whole, among the three categories of modifiers (i.e., syntactic downgraders, lexical/phrasal downgraders and upgraders), all the groups make more use of lexical/phrasal downgraders than the other two categories. When comparing among the four groups, we find that ENS tends to make the most use in the category of syntactic downgraders and upgraders, followed by EFL-A, EFL-I and then CNS As for the category of lexical/phrasal downgraders, EFL-A makes the most use. Regarding the four groups’ uses of the sub-categories of each main category, ENS tends to favor past tense of modals or auxiliary verbs, a sub-category of syntactic downgraders, more than EFL-A and EFL-I, in particular, to EFL-I. This reveals that EFL learners have the most difficulty in making use of the politeness function of this sub-category to mitigate the force of their disagreement, though they have all received instruction on the pragmatic use of this sub-category. Concerning the use of the other sub-category, conditional clause, the results show that there is not much difference among the four groups in its use, due to the effect of L1 transfer, for Chinese language also has the grammatical structure of conditional clauses; hence, it is considered to be easy for EFL learners to employ this sub-category to mitigate their disagreement.
As far as the sub-categories of lexical/phrasal downgraders are concerned, the results reveal that ENS tends to have the lowest mean on politeness marker and maybe this is because this sub-category is greatly emphasized early in people’s childhood in Chinese culture. Regarding hedges, EFL-A is more adept at making use of them to mitigate the force of their disagreement, and this also leads to EFL-A’s long utterances than EFL-I. With respect to the use of downtoners, the researcher come across the finding that a wider range of it is found in the data of ENS and EFL-A than in that of EFL-I. Concerning subjectivizers, EFL-A and ENS are inclined to make more use of it than EFL-I. This reveals that both ENS and EFL-A are more adept than EFL-I at making use of it to gain extra time to plan their following utterances. In addition, both the groups of ENS and EFL-A have the tendency to make more use of inclusive pronouns than the other two groups. Last but not least, ENS is inclined to make the most use of contrastive markers and CNS tends to make the least use of it. Regarding the sub-category of upgraders, intensifiers, both ENS and EFL-A make more use in this sub-category than EFL-I with statistical distinctiveness. In addition, in the use of emphatic do/does, ENS and EFL-A tend to be more adept at making use of this structure than EFL-I, for this structure does not exist in Chinese language. Thus, to some extent, it causes difficulty to EFL-I subjects.
In conclusion, all these results reveal that firstly, to some extent, the variables of social status, gender of the subjects and gender of the subjects’ interlocutor do cast some influence on the four groups’ employment of strategy types, mean length of oral production and employment of the paralinguistic features. Secondly, in the examination of the subjects’ use of modifiers in the supportive moves, the results also shed light into the effect of pragmatic transfer in that EFL-A demonstrates a greater developmental tendency toward ENS, whereas EFL-I’s behavior resembles that of CNS.
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