Compliment Responses in Naturalistic Settings: Native English Speakers vs. Chinese L2 Speakers

1. Compliment Responses in Naturalistic Settings: Native English Speakers vs. Chinese L2 Speakers Dongmei Cheng Northern Arizona University

2. No… Don’t say that.

3. General Background • Responses to compliments usually mirror the socio-cultural values and politeness varieties of speakers. • Native English speakers: Accept the compliments e.g. A: You got a haircut! Looks great! B: Thank you! • English L2 speakers from Asian countries: downgrade/reject the compliments e.g. A: You got a haircut! Looks great! B: Really? It’s just so so. (Downgrading) e.g. A: You got a haircut! Looks great! B: No way! I don’t look good. (Rejection)

4. Compliment Responses by Chinese Speakers Wang, 2002: • Compliments on appearance: More likely to be disagreed with or shown surprise to. • Compliments on possessions: More likely to be accepted. • Interlocutor of equal status: More accepting and returning compliments • Interlocutor of higher status: More rejections Chen & Yang, 2010: • Social-cultural changes contribute to the shift of CR patterns:from rejections to acceptance

5. Research Goal • Limitations from previous studies: • Results were often not based on learners communicative performance in natural/naturalistic contexts (i.e. the adoption of written discourse completion tasks) • No rationales were provided on why learners produce CRs in certain ways in different situations (i.e. lack of qualitative data) • Purposes of the current study: • To compare and contrast CRs produced by Chinese L2 speakers and by native English speakers in communicative role-play settings • To provide qualitative data on reasons of learners’ production of CRs

6. Participants Speaker Group American Chinese ESL Chinese EFL n=15 n=15n=15 # of females 7 11 10 # of males 8 4 5 Age (Mean) 18.27 19.93 20.07 Age (SD) 0.70 1.53 1.03

7. Instrument: Naturalistic Role-play • Created by Tran (2004) • To elicit spontaneous production in controlled settings • Resembles natural data from real life • The participants are asked to do multiple communicative tasks without acknowledging the research focus.

8. Instrument: Retrospective Verbal Protocol • A common technique to trace the thoughts of participants • Conducted in Chinese & immediately after the role-play • Main purpose: account for the reasons of the CRs used by the participants in different situations • Other purpose: validating the authenticity of the CRs embedded in the role-play task

9. Procedure

10. Analysis: Role-plays • Three macro CR strategies: • Acceptance • Evasion • Combination • Holmes (1988, 1993) • Yu (2004) • Tang & Zhang (2009)

11. Analysis: Role-plays

12. Analysis: Role-play • Appreciation: ‘‘Thanks’’; ‘‘Thank you’’; ‘‘Yes’’; ‘‘Yeah’’; ‘‘Uh Huh’’ • Agreeing: ‘‘I know’’; ‘‘Yeah, I really like it.’’; ‘‘I’m glad you think so.’’ • Downgrading: ‘‘It’s nothing’’; ‘‘It’s ok’’; ‘‘I tried’’ • Qualifying: ‘‘I enjoyed doing it’’; ‘‘I worked hard on it’’ • Returning: ‘‘You’re not too bad yourself.’’ ‘‘I’m sure you’ll be great.’’ ‘‘Yours was good too.’’ • Non-idiomatic: The utterance does not fit into the native speaker’s norm but has a clear intention of showing acceptance to the compliment. e.g. A: I really like your outfit. B: I am very happy. or B: You too.

13. Analysis: Role-plays

14. Analysis: Role-play • Credit-shifting: ‘‘No problem.’’; ‘‘My pleasure.’’; You’re welcome.’’; ‘‘I got it from my mom.’’; ‘‘I learned this from school.’’ • Commenting: ‘‘It wasn’t hard’’; ‘‘I got it from the store.’’; ‘‘Red is my favorite color.’’ • Reassuring: “Really?” • Offering: ‘‘I can let you borrow it.’’ ‘‘You can have it if you like.’’ • Ignoring/giggling: No response, shifting to another topic or giggling.

15. Analysis: Role-play • Combination: ‘‘Thanks. It’s a gift from my mom.’’ Accept [appreciation] + Evade [credit-shifting]

16. Analysis: Retrospective verbal protocol • The researcher listened to the interview recordings and translated all Chinese ESL participants’ verbal reports into an English transcript. • Major themes were identified in this transcript to reflect the rationale for the participants to adopt the CR strategies in naturalistic settings.

17. Results: from role-plays Figure 1. Macro patterns of CRs.

18. Results: Responding to compliments on ability/work • A majority of Chinese ESL/EFL speakers showed appreciations but used other CR strategies infrequently. • Native English speakers used qualifying strategy as frequently as appreciation, followed by commenting strategy. e.g. Qualifying Interlocutor: That’s pretty good Taichi you were doing at the party. Participant: Yeah, I’ve been doing it for four years. e.g. Commenting Interlocutor: A friend of mine told me (about the participant winning the contest). She showed me a video of you singing—it was really good! Participant: Really? Thank you. I thought that ‘‘I Will Survive’’ was probably a really bold move, but it worked out better for me. I get to try out for American idol next year for free.

19. Results: Responding to compliments on appearance • Appreciation is still the most common strategy used by the three groups. • Returning the compliment was used moderately frequently by the NES and EFL speakers, but not by the ESL speakers. e.g. (NES) Interlocutor: Oh, no worries (referring to the participant’s apology for being late). Apparently you took so long getting ready—you look good! Participant: Haha, thanks. So do you. e.g. (EFL) Interlocutor: And you look so nice tonight. I really like the jacket you’re wearing. Participant: Oh, thank you. You look very nice, too.

20. Results: Responding to compliments on possessions • Appreciation is still the most commonly adopted strategy by the three speaker groups. • Commenting is used as frequently as appreciation by Chinese EFL speakers.

21. Results: Responding to compliments on personality Figure 2. Micro-patterns of CRs for personality

22. Results: from retrospective verbal protocols • Validation of the role-play task’s authenticity: Participants’ stated research focus is not related to compliment responses. They were equally able to provide impromptu responses to the interlocutor’s compliments, which were indeed successfully embedded in the multiple tasks of the role play without the participants’ awareness.

23. Results: from retrospective verbal protocols • Saying “Thank you/thanks” to show appreciation to compliments • Educational exposure • Lack of familiarity with the NES interlocutor Quote from ESL speakers: “I didn’t know what else to say, so I just said ‘thank you’ to not offend him/her.”

24. Results: from retrospective verbal protocols • Offering the objects/subjects being complimented on • In responding to the interlocutors’ compliments on ability/work (i.e., being aTaichimaster, a good singer or writer), the Chinese ESL participants demonstrated their moderate preference in offering help or lessons regarding the skills on which they were complimented. • “In Chinese, if someone says to me that he/she admired my Taichi performance and I’m good at it, I would say ‘Do you want to learn it? I could teach you.’’’(quoted from one ESL participant).

25. Results: from retrospective verbal protocols • Commenting on the possessions being complimented • Providing informative comments on possessions was much more easier than responding compliments with comments in other situations, because they always had something to say about their favorite personal possession, a car or a bike. • ESL participants: provide informative comments on the cost of their possessions (e.g., It costs me 100 dollars). • NES participants: comment on where the possession originally came from (e.g., I got it from Target).

26. Results: from retrospective verbal protocols • Ignoring/giggling to evade compliments on personality Interlocutor: ‘‘You brought a dish! Awesome! That was so thoughtful of you!’’ Participant: …(or giggle) • Most Chinese participants chose to keep silent just to be safe or giggle and then quickly move on to the next topic. • Quote from one Chinese student: ‘‘In Chinese I would reject this compliment quite firmly by saying something like I was not thoughtful. I knew I shouldn’t say this in English; however, I ran out of my words, not knowing what other things I could say.’’

27. Discussion • Chinese L2 participants demonstrated patterns similar to their NES counterparts in responding to compliments through successful use of ‘‘thank you/thanks’’ in most situations. • Offering further comments (e.g., I worked hard on it.), a common strategy used by the NESs to continue conversations in responding to compliments on ability/work, was not adequately used by either L2 groups. • Between the two L2 groups, the EFL participants seemed to face more difficulties in mastering a variety of strategies in responding to compliments.

28. Limitations • Only one speech act; limited number of participants per group • Participants’ pragmatic performance might be influenced by their relationships with the interlocutors. • None of the Chinese L2 speakers were familiar with their interlocutors. • The native speakers in this study were assigned to do the role plays together with one of their classmates.

29. Conclusion • This study has demonstrated its success in utilizing the naturalistic role play, a performance-based research instrument to keep the balance between authenticity and research control. • Chinese ESL/EFL speakers used different sets of strategies in responding to compliments in English compared to native speakers. • Reasons: 1) cultural differences; 2) limited L2 proficiency • Future direction: 1) More commonly occurring speech acts; 2) consideration of contextual variables; 3) examining the acoustic features of spoken speech acts & their impact on interpersonal communication.

30. Thank you! Questions? Email:Dongmei.Cheng@nau.edu Reference: Cheng, D. (2011). New insights on compliment responses: A Comparison between native English speakers and Chinese L2 speakers. Journal of Pragmatics, 43 (8), 2204-2214.