Strategies of Opposition in Children's Interaction

• Main Authors: Lin, Yi-Ting, 林宜葶
• Other Authors: Su, Hsi-Yao
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/18792315970337307139

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語學系 === 104 === Opposition is prominent in children’s interaction, but a systematic analysis among Mandarin-Chinese speaking children in Taiwan is still lacking. This thesis aims to investigate children’s oppositional strategies in peer interaction and to compare children’s strategies with adults’. The analysis is based on the twenty-five hours of audio-and videotaped interactions in a public elementary school in Taipei. A total of 32 children in lower-grades (i.e., aged around 7 to 8) participated in the study. This study examines the data both quantitatively and qualitatively. On the basis of the spontaneous data, children’s opposition falls into four main types, including challenge, verbal abuse, refusal, and disagreement. Each type can be subdivided into various categories. Children may compare themselves with others, purposely challenge others’ courage, and criticize others’ performance and behavior in an attempt to show their superiority. Language play and taboo words/expressions are exploited as linguistic resources for verbal abuse. Refusal and disagreement are expressed by pragmatic strategies, including 10 refusal strategies (3 strong and 7 weak forms) and 9 disagreement strategies (5 strong and 4 weak forms). This study and previous research on adults’ opposition (Liao, 1994; Lin, 1999) suggests that both children and adults prefer aggressive strategies to passive ones. Nevertheless, children oppose more directly than adults with a great deal of minimal disagreement tokens. They seldom avoid confrontations. Different from adults, children rarely use downtoners, such as modals, contrast markers, and qualifiers. From the perspective of language socialization, it is suggested that lower-graders are linguistically competent but still learning to oppose in culturally appropriate ways since ‘saving face’ is highly valued in Chinese community.