How the Chinese and the British evaluate the speech act of apology

Using authentic video prompts, this study examines the Chinese and the British evaluation of the speech act of apology from both the cross-cultural socio-pragmatics perspective and the inter-lingual pragmatics perspective. The findings demonstrate that the Chinese respondents are more face-oriented, that is,they tend to correlate the need for face-saving with the necessity to apologize, while their British counterparts are more fact-oriented or that they are more inclined to consider the severity of offense in advance. The study also shows the importance of culturally induced non-verbal aspects of apologizing behavior. Knowing that the realization and the effectiveness of speech acts are contingent upon appropriateness of the body language, teachers should redouble their efforts to improve the students' meta-pragmatic awareness that would enable them to integrate paralinguistic elements in the practical setting.