A Pragmatic Study of Vietnamese Students’ Strategies of Making and Responding to Complaints

This study aimed to explore the strategies employed by Vietnamese university students when making complaints and responding to complaints. The data collection instruments included Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) and retrospective interviews, providing both quantitative and qualitative data. DCTs were used to elicit responses in 8 controlled scenarios, while retrospective interviews provided more profound insights into why the strategies were selected and employed in making and responding to complaints. The DCT data were collected from 100 Vietnamese university students, and 10 of them were invited for retrospective interviews in a subsequent session. A modified version of Trosborg's (1995) coding scheme was employed to classify students’ complaint strategies, while an adapted model from Laforest's (2002) work was used to identify strategies of responding to complaints made by the students. The findings revealed that Vietnamese students used a wide range of strategies in making complaints and responding to complaints, which largely corresponded to Trosborg’s (1995) scheme and Laforest’s (2002) model, respectively. Specifically, the Vietnamese data indicated that Request, Indirect accusation, Opting out, and Direct accusation were the most popular complaint strategies, whereas those for complaint response strategies were Excusing oneself, Agreeing to change behavior, and Suggesting alternatives. The findings of this research contribute to the broader understanding of speech act research in the field of pragmatics and offer some implications for enhancing communicative competence and language teaching and learning.