American college students' requesting competence in Chinese as a foreign language

Using written Discourse Completion Task, this study examined requesting competence of American college students learning Chinese as a foreign language. In analyzing requesting behaviors, we focused particularly on the use of request strategy and external modification strategy. Comparing the practices of Chinese native speakers and the learners, we found that the learners’ competence in making requests in Chinese is generally low in that their use of request did not approximate much to the practice of native speakers. On the one hand, the learners overused conventional indirect strategies, which affected the appropriateness of their requesting behaviors; on the other hand, in mitigating the face-threatening effects of head act, the learners used far fewer external modification strategies than native Chinese speakers did. In addition, we found that learners’ competence in adjusting their strategy use in response to situational variations also lagged behind that of the native speaker.