Researching and Teaching Second Language Speech Acts in the Chinese Context

This book contributes to the literature of interlanguage pragmatics by building an interface between researching and teaching speech acts in the Chinese context. It is written for researchers, language educators, classroom teachers and readers who are interested in interlanguage pragmatics research, acquisition and teaching, with particular reference to speech acts performed by Chinese learners of English, and their relationships with the learners' first language and cultural concepts. It provides a more advanced understanding of the production and development of speech acts of Chinese learners of English from the cross-linguistic, cross-cultural, L1 and L2 developmental perspectives, drawing on relevant second language acquisition theoretical frameworks. It also recommends research-informed pedagogies that are applicable to other learners of English.


Dr. Cynthia Lee is Associate Professor of Centre for Applied English Studies at the University of Hong Kong. Interlanguage pragmatics is one of her research areas. Over the past 12 years, she has secured two prestigious government-fund research grants to investigate the acquisition and development of L2 speech acts of Chinese learners of English from childhood to their teens, and has published numerous articles in pragmatics journals, including Pragmatics, International Review of Pragmatics, Lodz Papers in Pragmatics, Intercultural Pragmatics, and Journal of Pragmatics. A book chapter on Chinese English learners' speech act behaviours and Chinese culture will appear in Chen's edited volume Politeness Phenomena Across Chinese Genres, published by Equinox in October, 2017. She has also taught the postgraduate courses of 'Pragmatics Learning and Teaching', 'Discourse Analysis' and 'Second Language Acquisition'.