Exploring Taiwanese EFL Learners Pragmatic Competence in the Production of Formal Written Request via E-mail

• Main Authors: Chia-Ti Tseng, 曾嘉悌
• Other Authors: Dr. Yueh-kuey Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2011
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/17877296760575693309

博士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系博士班 === 99 === This study aims to explore Taiwanese EFL learners’ pragmatic competence in the production of formal written request via email to faculty in the institutional setting. It sets to find out the politeness strategies adopted by Taiwanese university students when they make email requests in English to faculty (i.e., the Chair of the English Department and the English professors), including their choice of linguistic forms of requestive head acts, the internal and external modifications, and the information sequencing of their email messages. To find out how levels of imposition would affect the use of politeness strategies, different email tasks with varied imposition levels were designed to examine if and how students’ use of request strategies and politeness features would vary in accordance with different email tasks. Students of two linguistic levels (i.e., lower-intermediate, higher-intermediate) were included and the differences in their realization patterns of politeness strategies would allow insights for the developmental aspect of pragmatic acquisition. To understand why these EFL students chose certain politeness strategies, a retrospective questionnaire and a semi-structured interview were conducted to investigate the factors which influenced their choice of linguistic politeness strategies and the difficulties they encountered in the process of composing these email requests. In total, sixty Taiwanese university students, from two universities in Northern Taiwan participated in the current study and 180 request emails were composed for qualitative and qualitative investigation. By applying Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper’s (1989) CCSARP speech act analysis framework, the results revealed that students of both levels adopted more direct strategies as main requestive head acts for clarity and used the most numbers of supportive moves prior to the request to mitigate the illocutionary force in the highest imposition request. Different combinations of supportive moves were also adopted for different request tasks by the two groups, indicating students’ awareness of different imposition levels inherited in different request tasks designed. In addition, the higher-intermediate proficiency group displayed more resources in creating more polite email messages to professors by using more internal and external modifiers for their request than their less proficient counterparts. The developmental sequences in the use of politeness features can thus be identified accordingly. However, certain syntactic and lexical downgraders never appeared in the higher level group’s email messages, pointing toward their unfamiliarity with these devices and thus suggesting the need for explicit teaching of these elements in the language classroom. From the preferred use of direct strategies, supportive moves, as well as a pre-posed request sequences, L1 pragmatic transfer can be clearly observed in the email messages of both groups. The possible perlocutionary effect of this transfer was analyzed and the pedagogical implications and suggestions aiming at solving students’ difficulties encountered were suggested in the study.