Chinese Compliment Responses and Its
Implications to Chinese Language Teaching and Learning
Gou Wenwen (苟雯雯)
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.