| Summary: | 博士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學系 === 106 === This study investigated the interlanguage behavior of Chinese learners of American English by focusing on their responses to disagreement in a second language (L2). In this dissertation, the linguistic behavior of Taiwanese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners in Taiwan was compared with Taiwanese native speakers of Mandarin Chinese and native speakers of American English to examine the EFL learners’ performance of the speech act of disagreement response in equivalent contexts. In addition to cultural background and the proficiency level, two more independent variables, disagreement directness and gender, were also investigated to explore L2 university students’ responses to disagreement within equal status, low imposition everyday contexts.
Data for this study were collected through discourse completion task (DCT), which is a questionnaire research method to elicit target responses. Participants’ responses were classified into four main strategies, and repeated-measures analyses of variance were conducted to identify the pragmatic differences that distinguished the behavior of two EFL learn groups from Taiwan, as well as two native groups, Chinese and English, from Taiwan and the American, respectively. Data were examined using a non-parametric method, the chi-square test.
The result indicated that across groups, participants tended to adopt mitigated disagreement strategies to respond to disagreement the most. When proficiency level of the learners is taken into concern, L2 intermediate participants were reported to use mitigated disagreement strategies the least, and with the increase of the proficiency level, L2 participants were detected to use mitigated disagreement strategies more. The two L2 groups were discovered to use explicit disagreement, avoidance, and agreement strategies more than the NS-E group, and the development pattern was detected in that the more proficient the learners were in the target language, the higher the chance they opted for the preferred mitigated strategies, and the less the chance of resorting to the other response strategies.
When responding to different levels of directness, different preferences to the response strategies were reported across groups. The four groups were reported to use mitigated disagreement strategies to different imposing force of disagreement. Differences, however, were discovered in the selection of strategies. When responding to mitigated disagreement, participants across four groups tended to adopt mitigated strategies with positive politeness. As the imposing force got stronger, the two native groups remained tending to use mitigated strategies with positive strategies, whereas the learners tended to adopt mitigated strategies with negative strategies. However, same implication could not be transferred when the imposing force was implicit. All of the four groups tended to adopt mitigated disagreement strategies with negative strategies when the imposing force was implicit.
The results also indicated that participants with lower proficiency tended to directly translate their L1 pragmatic norms and were more straightforward and lack of mitigations when disagreeing. Unlike the American participants, they rarely used syntactic modifier to mitigate their disagreement responses. With the increase of proficiency, the L2 participants used more mitigated disagreement strategies. The qualitative analysis, however, showed that compared to the American participants who employed more internal modifiers to mitigate, they adopted more external modifiers, in which lexical and phrasal modifiers precede or follow the actual disagreement.
Lastly, the effect of speakers’ gender as well as addressees’ gender was investigated. The results of our research indicated that women are less explicit when proffering disagreement to respond to disagreement. Women from different cultural backgrounds, however, differed in response strategies, which conformed to their cultural values and beliefs. The Chinese female were found to adopt explicit disagreement less, especially when the addressees were male. The American female participants used explicit disagreements slightly more when the addressee was male. The American male participants, on the contrary, adopted explicit disagreement observably to the female addressees. The Chinese male were more explicit when the addressee was female. Four groups of participants, irrespective to their gender, background, and proficiency level, all tended to use more mitigated disagreement strategies more to male addressees than to female addressees, more agreement strategies to female addressees than male. Moreover, the effect of proficiency level was found to place different levels of impact onto language learners across gender. The higher the proficiency level, the more likely they approximate the target-like speech act behavior. Consequently, we concluded that cultural background, proficiency level of the target language, disagreement directness and gender significantly influence disagreement response strategies.
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