Chinese Compliment Responses and Its Implications to Chinese Language Teaching and Learning

 

Gou Wenwen (苟雯雯)

Seton Hall University

 

Recently a growing number of American students have become interested in learning Chinese as a second language. However, Chinese is not an easy language to learn. In particular, even L2 learners of Chinese have mastered the language at a reasonable level, misunderstandings still occur between learners of Chinese and native Chinese speakers. One reason is that learners of Chinese do not understand the pragmatic applications of the language. Previous research notices that misunderstandings of compliment responses (CRs) occur between American students and Chinese students. This paper will address the question how Chinese speakers respond to a compliment today. It will find the possible strategies used by Chinese speakers and the factors that influence their answers. I will use the Discourse Completion Task (DCT) to convey my studies and 60 native Chinese speakers will respond to eight real life compliments by filling in the questionnaires. The results will be categorized into three macro strategies ‘Acceptance’, ‘Rejection’ and ‘Acceptance with Amendment’. My pilot study suggests that it is still very common for Chinese to reject a compliment today. The results also show that the CR strategies vary from the social distance between the interlocutors. By examining the way how Chinese perform the CRs, teachers of Chinese language can be aware of the CR pattern in Chinese today and they can better teach students the possible compliment responses in Chinese. Also, students can be aware of the responses in Chinese which are not exist or considered unusual in English in order to avoid misunderstandings.