A Comparative Study of Compliment Responses between Chinese and Korean EFL Learners

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study focused on investigating the similarities and differences between Chinese and Korean L2 learners shows that there’s no universal pattern that can be used to describe the two groups’ CRs. Both the two groups response to compliments in the following preference sequence, Accept, Evade and Reject. As for micro levels, Chinese L2 learners made more use of Accept strategies while Korean L2 learners used Evade more. Due to different second language acquisition methods, Chinese L2 learners showed to have a more direct attitude towards accepting compliments.
However, there are still some limitations in this study. First, the sample of participants is a little bit small. Based on Tang and Zhang’s study (2009), there are people who prefer to use Reject. However, in this study, there were no Reject responses among all the Chinese L2 learners’ replies. This, to some degree, may influence the results and comparative analyses of the two groups. Second, before the DCT, the background survey asked the participants whether they had experiences of being in English speaking countries and why they came there. However, this variable is not analyzed in the study. Since there is no standard criterion for personal experience, it’s difficult to know how much personal experience will influence participants’ expressions. Finally, although the DCT is designed as short as possible, it’s undeniable that it still takes participants some time to finish it. Whether the participant expresses all he/she wants to or not is hard to know and this is also a possible variable that has influences on the experimental data.
Further research on the CRs of Chinese L2 learners and Korean L2 learners needs a more sophisticated and accurate experiment design and I hope this study, though imperfect, can be of some help to relevant research.

Key words: EFL. compliment response, speech act