The Path of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language--A Case Study of Politeness Speech Act Differences between Chinese and English

Abstract

This paper takes the differences between Chinese and English polite speech acts as the research starting point, under the theoretical framework of cross-cultural pragmatics and second language acquisition, adopts the method of comparative analysis and case analysis, selects the typical corpus in the spring of a small town and my fair lady, makes a contextual investigation on the speech acts of invitation, assertion, apology and gratitude, and systematically discusses the differences in polite expression between Chinese and English and its teaching significance. The study found that although Chinese and English politeness speech acts follow similar pragmatic principles, they show significant differences under the influence of cultural values and face concepts: the Chinese context emphasizes collectivism and tends to use implicit, modest and indirect expressions. In the English context, individualism and individual rights are emphasized. The expression is more direct and depends on explicit politeness markers. These differences can easily lead to pragmatic failures in Chinese communication by native English learners. Based on this, this paper proposes to improve learners’ Politeness pragmatic competence and intercultural communicative competence by optimizing the content of teaching materials, introducing an authentic corpus and strengthening strategy teaching.