Polite Requestive Strategies in Emails: An Investigation of Pragmatic Competence of Chinese EFL Learners

Abstract

This paper is motivated by the premise that little is known about the use of requestive strategies in request emails in Chinese English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) context. Specifically, the paper examines and compares requestive strategies in request emails between two groups of university students, namely English majors (EM) and non-English majors (NEM). It then explores whether the assessments of three situational factors: assessments of social distance, power and rank of imposition, either alone or combined, has a statistically significant effect on the choice of requestive strategies by the two groups. In reference to some existing similar research, the paper argues that both groups under study seemed to exhibit inadequate sociopragmatic competence and pragmalinguistic knowledge. The study thus sheds some light on Interlanguage Pragmatics research on the Chinese EFL context. The paper finally offers some pedagogical implications in foreign language settings.

Keywords

pragmatic competence requestive strategies sociopragmatics pragmalinguistics emails Chinese EFL learners

Introduction and Rationale of the Study

Chinese universities have attached great importance to English. Students who are non-English majors (NEM) have to pass the College English Test (CET) Band 4 examination. On the other hand, a higher-level test, the Test for English Majors (TEM) Band 4, is mandatory for English majors (EM). The two national English tests are prerequisites for students applying for a Bachelor’s degree. However, these tests only examine students’ general English proficiency and do not focus on their pragmatic competence in particular.

Pragmatic competence is roughly divided into two components: pragmalinguistic competence and sociopragmatic competence. According to Leech (1983), pragmatics is composed of pragmalingusitics (the more linguistic end of pragmatics) and sociopragmatics (the sociological interface of pragmatics). Therefore, pragmalinguistic competence refers to speakers’ ability to infer the communicative intention of purpose of an utterance beyond the most literal meaning. On the other hand, sociopragmatic competence refers to speakers’ knowledge of adapting speech act strategies to the situational or socio-cultural variables in a communicative event.

Pragmatic competence guides ‘the theoretical direction for the measurement of interlanguage pragmatics’ (Yamashita, 2008: 202). In order to communicate appropriately in a target language, learners need to develop their pragmatic competence in the second/foreign language. Therefore, an investigation which focuses on the pragmatic competence of the Chinese learners, especially of the university students who have passed the compulsory English tests for their degree certificate, is imperative in the current study. The investigation will likely help to disclose whether the pragmatic competence of learners in Chinese EFL context is in balance with their grammatical competence.

Research on L2 pragmatic competence has often focused on learners’ speech act behavior. Following this trend, this study has examined requests in emails written by students to university professors. Making requests, as a directive speech act (Searle, 1979), involves the speaker’s attempt to get the hearer to do something in response to what he/she says. It is regarded as a face-threatening act (FTA) (Brown and Levinson, 1987). According to Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984), making requests is an especially difficult speech act for language learners and especially for second language (L2) learners. To successfully realize a high level of appropriateness when making a request, L2 learners should have substantial cultural and linguistic knowledge.

Another motivation for this study is that electronic mail (email) has become a very important medium for both interpersonal and institutional communications, particularly in academic and business institutions due to its high transmission speed and less intrusive nature than traditional letters (Crystal, 2001). Moreover, at universities and colleges, email assumes more functions besides communication, including the delivery of materials as well as course management (Worrels, 2002).

However, as Baron (2000) and Murray (1995) pointed out, people may feel it hard to write emails to those perceived as higher in status in the workplace because such asymmetrical-power emails are complicated with various face-threatening acts. According to this situation, it is imaginable that non-native speakers may feel it even harder to compose status-unequal emails, which demand that writers have sufficient pragmatic competence, high linguistic ability, and familiarity with the norms and values of the target culture.

In the last few decades, especially after the turn of the millennium, there has been a body of research conducted on email requests and examining pragmatic difference by native and non-native speakers (Al-Ali and Sahawneh, 2008; Biesenbach-Lucas, 2006, 2007; Chen, 2001, 2006; Lee, 2004; Hendricks, 2010, to name but just a few). However, few studies on the email requests produced by mainland Chinese English learners have been conducted. The Chinese subjects in these studies were commonly from Taiwan and Hong Kong which are different from China mainland in terms of social-cultural contexts.

To fill the research gap identified above, this study attempts to explore the pragmatic competence of two groups of Chinese EFL learners in writing request emails to professors. It focuses on comparing the requestive strategies and requestive politeness features in the head acts of emails between the two groups. The head act refers to, according to Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) ‘the minimal unit which can realize a request and it is the core of the request sequence’ (1989; 275). It is usually constructed with other components such as alters and supportive moves into a request sequence.

The following email from the data of the research illustrates different parts of the email. The email is divided into four parts which adapted Blum-Kulka’s (1989) coding framework:

Openings, which include alerters.

Closings.

Head acts.

Supporters.

The email is coded in the following:

(Openings) Dear Mark Brown:

How are you, Dr. Brown? (Supportive moves) I hope you have been happy these days. Because I will tell you something that may be can make you unhappy.

I haven’t completed my maths thesis yet. And I know I should hand it to you today, but I’m sorry I can’t. I swear I will complete it as soon as I can. (Head act) I hope you can agree that I hand it to you a few days later. (Supportive move) I’m sorry to trouble you.

(Closings) Thank you very much.

Your student…

Head acts in all the emails will be concentrated on in the current study. For example, the head act in this email I hope you can agree that I hand it to you a few days later and the syntactic feature such as I hope…will be sorted out to be investigated with head acts in other emails. The research findings on Chinese EFL learners are then compared with those of native English speakers (NES) in other similar research of mine. In this way, the pragmalinguistic competence of the participants is revealed in terms of their performance on selecting polite requestive strategies and syntactic/lexical devices. Furthermore, it aims to investigate the extent to which the social variables, judgments of Power, Distance, and Ranking of the imposition of the requested act affect the learners’ choice of requestive strategies. This thus helps to evaluate the sociopragmatic competence of the two groups. The following questions guided the research.

Do students’ emails to professors in Chinese EFL context promote more direct or indirect request strategies in and between the two learner groups? Does directness level vary with low- and high- imposition requests in the two groups?

Can the assessments of power, distance, and ranking of the imposition predict the requestive strategies choice by the two groups?

How do the two groups of Chinese EFL learners use syntactic and lexical devices to express politeness in their request emails?

Background

Requesting Behaviour and Its Link to Indirectness

As noted above, request is regarded as one of the most difficult speech acts for language learners, especially for second language (L2) learners. Request behaviour is regarded as a face-threatening act (FTA) (Brown and Levinson, 1987), and face is divided into two opposite aspects–positive and negative face. Positive face is defined as the need by all humans to be appreciated, while negative face is the desire not to be imposed upon. Making a request, accordingly, poses a threat to the hearer’s negative face, for the speaker is imposing on the hearer to do what the speaker wants. Therefore, the speaker should try to minimize the threat to the hearer’s negative face to realize his/her request goal.

In English (Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-American) culture, politeness is generally positively correlated with indirectness (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989). According to this assertion, in the following two sentences which are adopted in the data under study, the first sentence is generally regarded as more polite than the second, for the first one gives an option to the professor not to act and thus minimizes the negative face threat. Examples are demonstrated in the following:

1. I wonder if you could write a reference for me.

2. I want to ask you to write a reference for me.

The degree of politeness/indirectness required in reducing the threat to the face is principally decided by three factors, the relative power (P) between the speaker and hearer, the social distance (D) of them, and the absolute ranking (R) of the imposition in a particular culture (Brown and Levinson,1987). These variables, as Brown and Levinson proposed, could assess the weightiness of an FTA (the seriousness or the estimate of risk of face-loss). The weightiness of FTA is calculated as: Wx = D(S, H) + P (H, S) + Rx. Based on this formula, the authors claim that the degree of face threat is positively correlated with the Wx of the speech act. In regard to the speech act of request, the greatness of Wx will lead to a high degree of face threat and ultimately cause the speaker or writer to choose a high degree of indirect strategies to make speech acts. On the other hand, besides the whole holistic effect of the three variables, each variable plays a role independently in the choice of indirect strategies.

The conceptual framework of analysis by Brown and Levinson is employed for the current study. As Yeung (1997) suggested, despite much doubt on the relationship between social variables and politeness in different cultures, Brown and Levinson’s conceptual framework of politeness has proved to be the most germane in generating empirical speech (also see, Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2010).

Research on Student to Professor Request Emails

A large number of studies have been conducted on L2 learner-to-professor emails (e.g. Al-Ali and Sahawneh, 2008; Biesenbach-Lucas, 2007; Weasenforth and Biesenbach-Lucas, 2001; Woodfield and Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2010). Many studies employed the famous Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) coding framework (Blum-Kulka, et al., 1989). Similar results were found that non-native speakers of English (NNS) opted for more direct requests than native speakers of English (NS). In addition, the NNS used less syntactic modifications than NS. The NNS’ selection of lexical modification strategy was not as flexible as those of NS. As for supportive moves, the NNS had different options and presentation orders from those of the NS. These interlanguage problems, as Biesenbach-Lucas (2007) argued, are possibly due to a lack of pragmatic competence, or due to a transfer of speech act norms from their native language use.

With regards to how Chinese-speaking students make email requests to professors in English researchers, such as Chang and Hsu (1998), Chen (2001, 2006) and Lee (2004), found that the learners were unable to express themselves in appropriate linguistic forms and rhetorical strategies. They employed request strategies in emails that were different from those employed by native English-speaking students. Generally, Chinese students tended to structure their request emails in an indirect sequence using many pre-request supportive moves. They placed the request act at the end, and the linguistic forms of the request acts were more direct with fewer lexico-syntactic modifications. These strategies are interpreted and explained by culture-specific notions of politeness and the students’ social-cultural identities as reflected in their emails. Chinese speaking students probably transfer the request strategies that they normally use in Chinese. According to this, these studies thus concluded that the transfer may sometimes cause Chinese students to be unable to use English email requests appropriately and effectively in the institutional unequal-status communication.

The studies reviewed above have revealed the pragmatic problems (i.e. insufficient pragmatic competence) in the email requests made by Chinese learners of English. The problems first involve pragmalinguistic types such as external modification of requests (supportive moves) and internal (polite) modification. In other words, the Chinese learners could not follow the norm of rhetorical structure by native speakers of English who prefer to put supportive moves after the head act of request. In contrast, the Chinese learners in these studies preferred to put supportive moves before the head act of request, following the norm of Chinese rhetorical structure. Moreover, the Chinese learners’ English used fewer lexico-syntactic mitigation devices, such as I wonder if I could, in their head acts of requests than those by native speakers of English. On the other hand, the Chinese learners of English had sociopragmatic problems because they could not vary strategies of politeness and lexio-syntactic mitigation devices in congruence with the social variables such as power, distance, imposition of requests and the weightiness (Chen, 2006).

Methods

Participants

Two groups of Chinese undergraduate students, i.e. NEM and EM, who were studying in a university in Nanjing, China, participated in this study. Group 1 consisted of 67 Year 2 NEM, all of whom had passed the College English Test (CET) Band 4 examinations. Group 2 was composed of 64 Year 3 EM, all of whom had passed the Test for English Majors (TEM) Band 4 examinations. The TEM Band 4 generally demands that students have higher English proficiency than those who take part in the CET Band 4. Table 1 summarizes the information about the participants.

Table 1.

Distribution of Participants by Group, Age and Gender

Participants	Total number (n= )	Male (n= )	Female (n= )	Age Range (years old)
Group 1	67	22	45	18–20
Group 2	64	12	52	19–21

Each group was from an intact class. None of the students in the two groups had been studying abroad but three of the EM had visited English-speaking countries for a short period. According to the curriculum, the English majors had more frequent exposure to English language and culture than the non-English majors given the very intense training in English they had received at the university. Considering all the factors reported above, it was reasonable that differences could be found in the two groups of students’ sensitivity to the pragmatic competence in English.

According to the results of the background questionnaire, all the students had some experience of being taught by teachers speaking English as their native language, which means they had experience of communicating with foreign teachers. More than half of the two groups of the participants started learning English at the first year in junior high school, and all the others started learning English at the fifth year of primary school. In other words, by the time of data collection the students had been learning English for at least eight years. None of the participants received special instruction in email requests before the study. All the informants reported that they spent some extra time studying English after the English classes, and they thought original English films, TV and network resources, and foreign teachers had been very helpful for their English studies. All the informants admitted that it was very important to learn daily English and they were more familiar with request than any other speech behavior. All participants reported that they had often written emails in Chinese, and only 15% of them had never written emails in English.

Instruments

Instruments used to elicit data are divided into three parts:

A background questionnaire concerning the demographic information about participants.

A task of email-request writing by all the participants.

A list of structured questions pertaining to the variables the participants considered in the process of writings.

Background Questionnaire

A background questionnaire not only provides the necessary information about participants, but also allows the analysis of the effect of a range of variables on pragmatic development (Rose, 2000). Therefore, a background questionnaire was administered among the two groups of participants (see Appendix, Part 1). The questionnaire included such participant information as the time spent learning English, the resources of input, the experiences of staying abroad, writing emails, and the level of familiarity with the target speech acts.

Task of Email-Request Writing

A discourse-completion task was employed to ask the participants to write full emails according to the provided situations. One potential criticism of this method is that the situations are fictional and generic. Under such circumstances, participants might be expected to base their responses upon stereotypes of the recipient (e.g. Bou-Franch and Lorenzo-Dus, 2005). However, O’Neill and Colley (2006) argue that in real educational contexts, students are acquainted with staff members within a very restricted context or may not know them at all, so stereotypes may have a more considerable influence upon their interactions than individuating information. On the other hand, according to Kasper (2000), a Discourse-Completion Test (DCT) has practical methodological and theoretical advantages over the field study. A DCT can collect a large sample and a prototype of the variants occurring in the individual’s actual speech.

Situations were divided into two categories: high imposition and low imposition, according to the request purpose designed for the email-writing task. The categorization was following Hartford and Bordovi-Harlig’s study (1996) in American academic surroundings. High-imposition requests include those asking for the bending of rules, i.e. asking for incomplete grades or to accept a late paper, or asking for extra work on the part of professors. Low-imposition requests include those asking for routine institutional information, asking for reference books or articles, and asking for appointments and responses that do not require much preparation on the part of professors.

Nine situations were designed for eliciting email requests. These situations were based on a pilot study, which consisted of interviews with students on what objectives they were most likely to achieve when writing email requests to professors. Table 2 shows the information of the situations (also see Appendix, Part 2).

Table 2.

Distribution of the Situations by High and Low Impositions

Imposition	Situation	Description of the situation
Low Imposition	1	Request to borrow a book from the teacher
	3	Ask for a leave from a lesson because of illness
	6	Ask for a leave from a lesson because of a seminar
	7	Ask for a face-to-face discussion with a teacher
High Imposition	2	Request for an extension of submitting a paper
	4	Ask a teacher to write a reference
	5	Ask to change the title of the paper
	8	Ask for extra guidance from a teacher
	9	Ask for the result of the module ahead of the prescribed time

Structured Questions

In this part, a sociopragmatic assessment questionnaire was conducted to examine the perception of social parameters (Distance and Power) and Rank of imposition by the participants (see Appendix, Part 3). Participants were asked to rank the extent to which they considered social parameters with a Likert-type scale (0 means not consider at all; 1 consider the factor a little; 2 neutral; 3 means the highest consideration). And the participants were asked to judge the degree of the imposition with a Likert-type scale (0 represents no imposition, 1 low, 2 neutral, 3 high and 4 very high).

Procedures for Data Collection

In order to create an authentic atmosphere of writing for the participants, all the questionnaires were completed and written in a video-audio classroom which was organized by a teacher. Each participant had a computer and they were asked to imagine that they were writing an email to one of their teachers from an English speaking country. They were asked to do the first and second parts of the questionnaire first. As for the second part, each participant was allocated a situation according to their registration number. The email could be of any length, but it had to be at least a full paragraph. The participants could consult their dictionaries or substitute a word with Chinese if they could not express it in English. After all the participants finished and submitted these two parts to the teacher through the computers, they were allocated the third part. All the participants returned their questionnaires and all of them had finished the questionnaires according to the instructions.

Data Analysis

As it was introduced above, the data consists of a variety of email requests written to professors according to different situations. The predictor variables examined in this study were the assessment of social status (P and D) and Rank of imposition by the participants and the EM/NEM status. The criterion variables examined were request strategies in these emails, the amount and type of lexical and syntactic modification and requestive perspectives.

Coding Framework of Requestive Strategies

In addressing the research aims, the study first identified the head act for request from each email. Furthermore, following Biesenbach-Lucas’ (2007) suggestions, the CCSARP coding framework of head acts was also adapted in the study. According to the directness levels, the requestive strategies are illustrated below with examples from the data:

Coding Categories in the present study (following Biesenbach-Lucas’ (2007) model):¹

1. Conventional Directness (CD)

(1) Imperatives (e.g. Please give me four days to finish the assignment.)

(2) Performatives (e.g. I wrote to ask for a leave from your class of intercultural courses.)

(3) Want statement (e.g. I would like to have a chat with you if you are convenient.)

(4) Expectation Statement (I hope that you can write a recommending letter.)

2. Conventional Indirectness (CID)

(5) Query preparatory (e.g. I wonder if you could tell me the examination result before the arranged date.)

3. Non-conventional Indirectness (NCID)

(6) Strong hint (Intention: changing the topic: e.g. I found my paper topic was not fit on me. Do you have an idea for me?)

In the next step, syntactic and lexical devices that mitigated the imposition of requests were identified in the data. They are presented below with examples under investigation:

1. Syntactic modifiers:

(1) Interrogative sentence, such as: can/could/would you… and may/can I.…

(2) Past tense, such as: I was wondering.…, could you…? Would you…?

(3) Progressive aspect: I was wondering… and I am wondering…

(4) If or whether clause, such as: I was/am wondering if…, I appreciate if…, If…, can/would you…, I want to know if you could…, Could I ask whether I can…

2. Lexical modifiers:

(1) Please

(2) Down toners: possibly, possible

(3) Understaters: a little, just,

(4) Hedgers: some, any

(5) Subjectivizers: I was wondering…, I want to know…, I hope…

Besides these mitigation devices, the request perspective employed by the students in the email requests was also examined within the CCSARP framework. Only two perspectives were found out of the four possible perspectives. The other two perspectives, i.e. we-perspective and impersonal perspective were not found. Here are the examples from the data:

(1) I (speaker)-perspective: I want to ask for leave of absence to have the course.

(2) You (hearer)-perspective: Can you help me to reschedule it next month?

Procedures of Data Analysis

The analysis consisted of both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data collected. In qualitative analysis, the head act(s) of the email requests were picked out for analysis. Then the mitigation devices and requestive perspective were identified.

The quantitative analysis was conducted with SPSS 15.0. It included:

Comparing the requestive directness level between the two groups with T-test.

Comparing the requestive strategies in terms of the categories of high and low impositions based on the learners’ own judgements within the two groups with T-test.

Correlation analysis on the relationship between the assessments of P, D, R with the weightiness and the polite strategies through Pearson Correlation Test.

The polite requestive directness level was measured with a 6-point rating scale ranging from ‘Imperatives’ (1) to ‘Strong hint’ (6). The highest point 6 indicates the highest indirectness and politeness. The judgements of P and D were rated with a four-point scale from 0-3 separately and the judgement of R with a five-point scale from 0-4. The weightiness was also calculated with the total sum of the three factors.

Results

Directness Levels in the Email Requests in and Between the Two Groups

There were 67 email letters in total by non-English majors and 64 by English majors. Table 3 summarizes the total number of the email letters written by the two groups and the number corresponding to each of the nine situations.

Table 3.

Distribution of the Email Letters by Situations and Groups

Situation	NEM (n=67)	EM (n=64)	Total number (N=131)
1. (borrowing books)	7	11	18
2. (requesting for an extension of assignments)	11	12	23
3. (asking for an absence because of illness)	8	5	13
4. (requesting a reference)	10	10	20
5. (asking for a change to the title of a paper)	6	6	12
6. (asking for an absence because other seminars)	6	5	11
7. (asking for an appointment)	6	3	9
8. (asking for extra guidance)	5	4	9
9. (asking for paper results ahead of time)	8	8	16

Table 4 reports the frequencies of the requestive strategies in terms of head acts by the two groups of learners.

Table 4.

Frequencies of the Requestive Strategies Used by the Two Learner Groups

Request Strategies	Frequency of non-English Majors	Frequency of English Majors	Total Frequency
Conventionally Direct Strategies	36 (53.7%)	24 (37.5%)	60 (45.8%)
Imperative	4 (6.0%)	4 (6.3%)	8 (6.1%)
Performatives	6 (8.8%)	5 (7.8%)	11 (8.4%)
Want statements	10 (14.9%)	8 (12.5%)	18 (13.7%)
Expectation statements	16 (23.9%)	7 (10.9%)	23 (17.6%)
Conventionally Indirect	27 (40.3%)	40 (62.5%)	67 (51.1%)
Strategies (Query-preparatory)
Non-conventionally Indirect Strategies (Strong Hint)	4 (6.0%)	0	4 (3.1%)
Total	67	64	131

Directness Levels of Requests Between the Two Groups

As shown in Table 4, both groups used conventional strategies (encompassing conventional directness and conventional indirectness) very frequently (NEM, 94% and EM, 100%). Only four strong hints (6.0%) were found from the group of the NEM and non-conventionally indirect strategy was not found in the EM’ data at all.

As for NEM, the preference order of request was CD>CID>NCID, while the preference order of EM was CID > CD > NCID. The NEM group used much more direct strategies (53.7% vs. 37.5%) and less indirect strategies (40.3% vs. 62.5%) than the EM group. A two-tailed test further confirmed that there was a statistically significant difference between the two groups (p=0.02). The EM group employed significantly more indirect requestive strategies than the NEM group. Table 5 reports the results of the 2-tailed T-test of the directness levels between the two groups.

Table 5.

Two-tailed T-test of the Directness Levels Between the Two Groups

Group	Mean	Std. Deviation	T	Sig. (2-tailed)
NEM(n=67)	3.39	1.743	2.186	.002**
EM(N=64)	4.63	1.287

p <0.01

Directness Levels of Requests in the Two Groups across Request Impositions

Before investigating the directness levels of requests across request impositions within the two groups, it was necessary to test whether the assessment of imposition of each situation by the learners was consistent to Harford and Brodovi-Harlig’s (1996) categorization. First the average score of the assessment on each situation was calculated. Scores of the assessment which were higher than 2 were interpreted as high imposing. In contrast, scores below 2 indicated that the situation was regarded as low imposing. Consequently, both groups judged that the imposition degree of Situations 1, 3, 6 and 7 were low and the degree of Situations 2, 4 and 9 was high. These results were consistent with the categorization by Harford and Bardovi-Harlig. However, neither of the two groups regarded the request imposition of Situations 5 and 8 as high (mean scores<2).

According to the assessment of imposition by the two groups, the emails were put into high-imposition and low-imposition categories. The directness of the head acts of between the two categories were compared within the two groups. A two-tailed T-test was conducted to show there was no statistically significant difference in the directness levels of request within the two groups (p=0.83, P=0.979 respectively). Table 6 demonstrates the results of the mean difference of request direct levels within the NEM group, and Table 7 shows the mean difference within the EM group.

Table 6.

Two-tailed T-test of Directness Levels Within the NEM Group

Group	Mean	Std. Deviation	t	Sig. (2-tailed)
LI(n=38 )	3.46	1.475	.216	.830, NS
HI(N=29)	3.33	1.635

Table 7.

Two-tailed T-test Directness Levels Within the EM Group

Group	Mean	Std. Deviation	t	Sig. (2-tailed)
LI(n=34)	4.65	1.149	−.026	.979, NS
HI(N=30)	4.61	1.067

LI means low imposition, and HI means high imposition.

Correlation between Assessment of Social Variables and Requestive Strategies

The Pearson Correlation, presented in Table 8, reveals that there were no correlations between the learners’ choice of polite requestive strategies and their assessment of social variables. Moreover, the combined effects of the three factors also had no significant impact on the choice of polite requestive strategies. This means the assessments of power, distance and the ranking of the imposition could not predict the indirect/polite strategies choice by the two groups.

Table 8.

A Result of Pearson Correlation Analysis of the Effects of Assessments of the Social Variables on Linguistic Politeness in the NEM and EM Groups

	Power (P)	Distance (D)	Imposition (I)	Combination
NEM group	pc=−.058	pc=−.235	pc=−.229	pc=−.213
(n=67)	p=.670, NS	p=.078, NS	p=.087, NS	p=.111, NS
EM group	pc=−.164	pc=−.088	pc=−.076	pc=−.102
(n=64)	p=.240, NS	p=.529, NS	p=.587, NS	p=.467, NS

pc means Pearson Correlation. NS means No significant correlation.

Mitigation Features in Chinese EFL Learners’ Email Request

Syntactic Modifiers

Table 9 shows that the EM used much more syntactic mitigation/politeness devices in the head acts of requests than the NEM (100% vs. 59.7%). More- over, the EM could use the politeness devices more flexibly than the NEM.

Table 9.

Frequency of Identified Syntactic Politeness Modifiers

Syntactic downgraders	Frequency		Total frequency
	NEM	EM	NEM+EM
Interrogative	21 (31.3%)	26 (40.6%)	47 (35.9%)
Aspect	0	4 (6.3%)	4 (3.1%)
Past tense	13 (19.4%)	14 (21.9%)	27 (20.6%)
If clauses	6 (9.0%)	20 (31.3%)	26 (19.8%)
Total	40 (59.7%)	64 (100%)	104 (79.4%)

Note: % indicates the percentage of head acts of each group which contained the type of modification indicated; percentage may be more than 100% because syntactic devices are not mutually exclusive but can occur together.

Specifically, both groups used the interrogative as a politeness device most frequently in requests. The two groups employed the past tense to a similar extent. However, the number of if-clauses used by the EM was three times more than that of the NEM. Moreover, while the EM used four requests with aspects like I was wondering… in their emails, the NEM did not use this syntactic politeness device at all.

Lexical Modifiers

Table 10 demonstrates the percentage of head acts of requests with lexical politeness devices used by the two groups of learners. The most intriguing finding here was that the two groups employed very few downtoners, understaters or hedgers respectively. The NEM tended to use a little more please and I hope… than the EM. As for I wonder…, the EM seemed to use the phrase flexibly while the NEM seemed not to grasp this type of lexical politeness device at all.

Table 10.

Frequency of Identified Lexical and Phrasal Downgraders

Lexical and phrasal downgraders		Frequency		Total frequency
		NEM	EM	NEM+EM
Please		8 (11.9%)	6 (9.4%)	14 (10.7%)
Downtoner		3 (4.5%)	4 (6.3%)	7 (5.3%)
Understater		0	2 (3.1%)	2 (1.5%)
Hedges		1 (1.5%)	2 (3.1%)	3 (2.3%)
Subjectivizer	I wonder	0	9 (14.1%)	11 (8.4%)
	I hope	12 (17.9%)	7 (10.9%)	21 (16.0%)
	Others	3 (4.5%)	1 (1.6%)	4 (3.1%)
Total		27 (40.3%)	31 (48.4%)	57 (43.5%)

Note: % indicates the percentage of head acts of each group which contained the type of lexical and phrasal downgraders indicated; percentage may be more than 100% because lexical and phrasal downgraders are not mutually exclusive but can occur together.

Request Perspectives

As regards the request perspectives, it was found that the two groups chose the hearer-dominance perspective rather than speaker-dominance perspective in a highly consistent way (NEM, 79.1% vs. 20.9; EM, 79.7% vs. 20.3%). And the frequencies in which the two groups used the two perspectives were similar.

Discussion

The Pragmalinguistic Competence of the Two Groups of EFL Learners

The research findings of this study show that the NEM might, in accordance to their lower proficiency in English against the EM, have lower pragmalinguistic competence than the EM. This is inferred in that the NEM used more direct and much less indirect requestive strategies than the EM. The email requests written by the NEM may thus be less appropriate than those of EM because in the upward request emails, students are expected to use more indirect strategies to soften request modification according to American English culture. In fact, the necessity of using more indirect strategies in the upward request emails by NS of English has been confirmed by a huge amount of research (e.g. Biesenbach-Lucas, 2006, 2007; Chen, 2001, 2006; Liao, 1997).

The lower pragmalinguistic competence of the NEM could also be shown in that the NEM used fewer and more limited syntactic and lexical mitigation devices for enhancing politeness than did the EM. For example, the NEM did not use the aspects and used less complicated sentences with if-clause in the head acts. In addition, the EM could use a little more diversified devices, like I wonder, than the NEM; while the NEM relied more heavily on I hope you can… which seemed to be transferred from Chinese request pattern Xiwang (hope) ni (you) neng (can or could) (Yeung, 1997).

However, there may be no reason to claim that the EM have had a very high, native-like pragmalinguistic competence. Compared with the research findings on the NS’ performance of writing emails in similar research conducted by Biesenbach-Lucas (2007), Zhu (2011) for example, the EM could not use abundant indirect requestive strategies, syntactic devices, or lexical phrasal modifiers to soften their requests in the emails. In Zhu’s (2011) research on an authentic data which was composed of 60 upward request emails written by British students attending a university in the UK, it was found the frequencies of using indirect requestive strategies, syntactic devices and lexical modifiers for politeness was 75.8%, 124.2% and 169.7% respectively. In contrast to these percentages, it is easily seen that the two groups of Chinese EFL learners, even the EM (the frequencies of using these three devices were 42.5%, 100%, and 48.5% respectively), especially in terms of utilizing lexical modifiers to soften politeness, might not have native-like pragmalinguistic competence to compose appropriate upward request emails.

Moreover, only two categories of perspective, speaker dominance and hearer dominance, were employed by the Chinese EFL learners to make requests. The other two categories, speaker and hearer dominance and impersonal were not used at all. According to Biesenbach-Lucas (2007), the impersonal perspective of requests like would it possible… would be more positive and thus more appropriate in some situations of students’ request emails. In the previous research, for example Biesenbach-Lucas (2007) and Zhu (2011), it was found that many NES preferred to express their requests from an impersonal perspective. The research finding on the choice of the requestive perspectives might therefore further indicate that the two groups of learners under study still did not have abundant pragmalinguistic competence.

The Sociopragmatic Competence of the EFL Learners

According to the research findings of this study, neither of the two groups of EFL learners under study seemed to have acquired enough sociopragmatic competence. The EM seemed to have similarly low sociopragmatic competence with that of the NEM, though the EM had higher pragmalinguistic competence than the NEM. According to the literature reviewed earlier, the level of indirectness/politeness of a request has strong positive correlations with the social variables such as power, distance, imposition and the weightiness. In other words, the choice of indirectness level is situation dependent. However, this study found none of the three factors of power, distance, and imposition assessments, either alone or combined, had a statistically significant effect to the choice of polite requestive strategies in emails by the two groups. Furthermore, both groups failed to vary their choice of requestive directness level in accordance with different situations, i.e. high-imposition and low imposition. In addition, the learners assessed the imposition of requesting in situations 5 and 8 as low, while according to Hartford and Brodovi-Harlig’s (1996) categorization, the imposition of the two situations was regarded as high under Anglo-American culture.

These research findings may result from the possibility that the Chinese EFL learners have ‘different perceptions of what constitutes appropriate linguistic behaviour’ (Thomas, 1983: 99). The non-correlation of social variables and politeness strategies choices, the non-variation of polite strategies among different situations, and different judgment of the imposition of some situations from native speakers may have displayed examples of ‘sociopragmatic failure’ (Thomas, 1983: 99). Such failure can occur when learners may evaluate the relevant situational factors according to Chinese sociopragmatic norms rather than the norms of the target culture (Chang and Hsu, 1998; Chen, 2001, 2006; Lee, 2004, etc).

Implications of the Study

This study investigated the upward request emails elicited from two groups of Chinese EFL learners. Several interesting findings emerged from the analysis of the head acts of request in the emails. First, as for pragmalinguistic competence, it seemed that both the NEM and the EM exhibited low levels according to their choices of requestive strategies and politeness devices to soften the request. In addition, English proficiency is still a key variable which decides the pragmatic performance of the two groups. The NEM could not use as many polite devices as the EM. Moreover, it was argued that both groups seemed to exhibit inadequate sociopragmatic competence according to the correlation analysis, the comparison of the polite strategies within the two groups and the judgment on the imposition of the situations.

In terms of these findings, this study has implications for pedagogical practice. In recent years, more and more Chinese students have preferred to receive their higher education in English-speaking countries. Yet, the deviations from the target language like choices of polite requestive strategies might lead to inappropriate communication with native English speakers in the future. While ‘the teaching of pragmatic competence has gained greater attention as pragmatics in the communicative competence models has begun to gain explicit attention’ (Taguchi, 2011: 290), teaching of pragmatics competence has obviously not gained much attention in Chinese EFL context. Therefore, teaching of pragmatic competence should be performed in Chinese EFL formal classroom settings. Moreover, researchers and English teachers in China may need to follow the recent academic trend to ‘explore optimal instructional practice and resources for pragmatic development’ (Taguchi, 2011: 289) of students in Chinese English formal classroom settings.

More specifically, both aspects of pragmatic competence-sociopragmatic competence and pragmalinguistic competence are to be developed in classroom teachings. Considering that both groups under study had low sociopragmatic competence, the Chinese English classroom needs to cultivate and raise sociopragmatic knowledge of learners to make them aware of the target socio-cultural norms of speech act realizations for politeness. In other words, the conscious-raising of polite speech acts in EFL/ESL classrooms is advocated. As Kasper (1997: 9) argues, the conscious-raising activities in classrooms could help learners to ‘make connections between linguistic forms, pragmatic functions, their occurrence in different social contexts, and their cultural meanings’ and to ultimately improve the learners’ sociopragmatic competence.

In special consideration of Chinese EFL learners’ use of strategies and devices of making polite speech acts, it is suggested that these need to be taught more explicitly in foreign language settings. As Tatayama (2001: 220) suggests, explicit teaching is ‘more effective than implicit teaching in facilitating the acquisition of L2 pragmatic routines that require a high formality of the linguistic expressions.’ Therefore, instructional intervention is necessary even for the learners with high level of English proficiency in Chinese universities. However, according to the research findings, classroom teachings in China seem not to include the exploration of different strategies and language choices for making polite and high appropriate speech acts. This has been deviated from the curriculum aims of EFL teachings which emphasize cultivation of pragmatic competence of university students.

In addition, following Economidou-Kogetsidis’ (2008) suggestions, textbook materials which emphasize the pragmatic aspects like lexical choices for making polite speech acts should be designed and developed in EFL/ESL settings. Furthermore, since EFL learners have very few opportunities to interact with native English speakers outside of class, it is suggested that more communicative activities could be made in classes. In this way, learners could access and integrate sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic knowledge more quickly and efficiently (Rose, 1994). Finally, in the information age, EFL teachers and learners need to be encouraged and guided to take advantage of web resources to teach and learn the complicated pragmatic aspects. For example, EFL teachers/learners could easily get access to learning materials of making polite and appropriate speech acts with the links set up in the Notes at the end of this paper.

Limitations of the Study and Suggestions for Future Research

This study, used the Discourse-Completion Test to collect data, and investigated how two groups of Chinese EFL learners made polite upward requests in their elicited emails. However, the DCT method only provided a measurement for investigating the students’ pragmatic knowledge. It did not necessarily demonstrate how students use this knowledge in real-life emails. Furthermore, the DCT method with Chinese questionnaires, together with other methodological problems (e.g. telling the participants that they could use words from Chinese in data collection), may have put the participants in bilingual mode. It thus might have caused the participants to find it harder to make judgments about how to make requests in a way that suits the target English culture. As a result, the validity of the research findings, especially on the sociopragmatic competence of the Chinese EFL learners might be reduced. Therefore, further study of more participants’ performance of email requests in their natural environment is required.

Among other limitations only two groups of Chinese university students were involved in this study and the research findings were only compared to those in earlier similar studies. This study has provided insights into the Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic competence on performing email requests in a general circumstance. Therefore, future studies might enroll native English students and native Chinese students in a single study to allow a better comparison of the data.

Finally, this study only focuses on the assessments of the social factors and internal modification of requests. The other dimension such as external modification, asserted by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989), contributing to the politeness value of linguistic action, may also need to be studied in a specific way. Meanwhile, as Lin (2009) points out, the details of sub-strategies (their form, function and distribution) of speech acts also demonstrate the need to obtain a more comprehensive picture of the learners’ language. The other factors in email, such as alerters, may also need to be studied to help gain deeper insight into email requests by EFL learners.

Footnotes

Appendix 2 Notes

Readers may wish to refer to the following speech acts teaching and learning resources online:

4. http://www.tesol.org/s_tesol/sec_document.asp?CID=326&DID=13270

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