Compliment and Compliment Response Behaviors of College Students in English Chatting

The purpose of this paper was to examine pragmatic abilities of EFL Korean learners in the performance of two speech acts, compliment and compliment response in authentic situations. To this end, 72 Korean college students engaged in on-line chatting for one semester, and chatting transcripts were analyzed to find characteristics of the two acts realized by students. It was shown that compliments of Korean students looked formulaic and sounded similar to those of English native speakers though they were limited in a repertoire of syntactic patterns and lexical items. They also responded to compliments by using nonacceptance strategies more often than acceptance strategies, unlike native speakers. The differences between the two groups were explained mainly by L1 transfer effects in which Korean students made frequent use of their L1 socio-cultural norms for L2 speech act performance. Some suggestions were given to help them overcome such L1 influence.