Strategic Deception in Interlanguage Pragmatics: A Comparative Study on Chinese EFL Learners and Native Speakers of American English

The speech act of strategic deception permeates every aspect of life. It not only involves false statements at the verbal level but may also be accompanied by deceptive nonverbal acts, such as facial expressions and body movements. This study employs a questionnaire survey, particularly the Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs), to collect and analyze samples from Chinese EFL learners and native speakers of American English in America (NSEs). Among them, the samples from NSEs served as a control group. The aim is to uncover Chinese EFL learners’ pragmatic characteristics and strategies in the speech act of strategic deception. The research questions focus on (1) Compared to NSEs, which strategies of the speech act of strategic deception do Chinese EFL learners tend to use more frequently? (2) Compared to NSEs, what speech act expression characteristics do Chinese EFL learners prefer to use? (3) What are the similarities and differences between Chinese EFL learners and NSEs in terms of pragmatic expressions? The findings indicate that Chinese EFL learners tend to adopt a relatively passive and defensive attitude in the speech act of strategic deception to maintain their face and control the communicative situation. They are also adept at using modals, interrogative sentences, and other expressions to mitigate the directness and offensiveness of speech acts, thereby maintaining the harmony of interpersonal relationships. In addition, compared to NSEs, Chinese EFL learners have some native language expressions that are rarely or never used and need to be further improved. This study provides valuable empirical evidence for the practical performance of Chinese EFL learners, contributing significantly to the in-depth development of cross-cultural communication research.