How do native speakers of Chinese and native speakers of Dutch compare in their expressions of requests in English?

Abstract

This paper aimed to build a better understanding of Dutch native speakers and Chinese native speakers when communicating in English. The intervention in this study specifically focused on the speech acts of requests. In order to solve the main research question, the research focuses on two aspects: formality of the context and the status of the interaction partner. The data were collected through a discourse completion task consisting of three sections. The first section includes the participants’ personal information, and the second section includes four scenarios. Two of the given scenarios are in formal contexts while the remaining two are in informal contexts. In each scenario, participants are required to write down their possible responses based on the difference of hearer’s status. The third section consists of two questions aimed at testing whether the given scenarios are strange to the participants. The data was collected from 15 Chinese native students and 15 Dutch native students. Subjects’ responses were classified into three request strategies. Based on the data analysis the conclusion underlines that Chinese and Dutch native speakers have different preferences for requesting strategies even the communication context is the same.