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Article published In:
Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education
Vol. 6:1 (2021) ► pp.3–31

Social contact and speech act strategies in a Chinese study abroad context

| Carnegie Mellon University
| Northern Arizona University
| Georgia State University

This study examined the relationship between reported amounts of social contact and speech act strategies among 70 learners of Chinese enrolled in a study abroad program in Beijing. The participants completed a computer-delivered spoken discourse completion task (spoken DCT) eliciting three speech acts: requests, refusals, and compliment responses. Speech act strategies were compared between two groups of learners who reported different amounts of social contact (high and low social contact) as assessed via a self-report survey. Results showed that both high and low social contact groups favored using similar strategies to achieve the three speech acts. However, the high social contact group produced speech acts in a more sophisticated way: with a wider variety of request strategies, multiple refusal strategies used in combination and more deflecting strategies in compliment responses, compared with the low social contact group. The findings suggest that social contact helped learners expand their pragmalinguistic repertoire and employ more varied speech act strategies.

Keywords: Chinese, speech act, social contact, request, refusal, compliment response
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1Study abroad, language contact, and pragmatic competence
    • 2.2Requests, refusals, and compliment responses in L2 Chinese
  • 3.Research question
  • 4.Methods
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Data collection instruments
      • 4.2.1Spoken discourse completion task
      • 4.2.2Social contact survey
    • 4.3Data collection procedures
    • 4.4Data analysis procedures
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Production of request strategies: High SC vs. low SC groups
    • 5.2Production of refusal strategies: High SC vs. low SC groups
    • 5.3Production of compliment response strategies: High SC vs. low SC groups
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Limitations and future directions
  • References
Published online: 12 March 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sar.20002.tan
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