Comparative DCT Research on the Speech Act of Suggesting Among Native and Non-native Speakers of English and Japanese

The speech act of suggesting was chosen as a topic for the present research, since compared to other speech acts, the number of studies on suggesting is relatively limited. With the help of the Written Discourse Completion Task method, this study aims to explore what structures native and non-native speakers of English and Japanese use to make suggestions in different situations, comparing whether the most frequently used structures coincide in the two languages. To be able to make this comparison, a written worksheet of three situations were given to the participants both in English and Japanese, and they were asked to give suggestions in those certain situations. The final results showed that the participants tended to use the same corresponding structures in the two languages regardless of their mother tongues, thus implying some parallelism between how suggestions are made in English and Japanese, even though the two.languages are linguistically very different from each other.