Exploring cross-cultural pragmatic judgement of two groups of EFL teachers on formal written requests

This study examines the pragmatic judgments made on formal request letters written by adult L2 learners of English by two groups of EFL teachers at the English Language Centre at City University of Hong Kong. A pragmatic Judgment Questionnaire was completed and returned by each of the sixteen teachers (eight native Cantonese speakers and eight native English speakers). The participants were subsequently interviewed individually. The data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. Pragmatic judgment was examined by investigating four pragmatic variables adapted from Hudson, Detmer and Brown (1995); and Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989) in the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) Project – i.e., politeness, directness, formality and amount of information. Main research findings suggest that there were no significant differences between the two groups of teachers in their pragmatic judgments in most aspects, except for their views on: • what constituted “unnaturally polite” expressions, • whether negative words would help to achieve the purpose of a message, • what supporting moves should be avoided, and • what writing plans they preferred. Qualitative analysis revealed examples of three degrees of politeness: "unnaturally polite"/ "polite" / "impolite" expressions, as well as inappropriate supportive moves in relation to the three writing topics used in the study.