Mandarin Chinese peer advice online: a study of gender disparity

Abstract In the higher education environment, peer-to-peer evaluation is a common learning activity and is beneficial to students’ development. Nevertheless, peer evaluations often include unsolicited advice, which potentially damages the face of advice-receivers and their interpersonal relationship with advice-givers. In the literature, little is known about how the potentially face-destructive advice messages in the academic discourse are pragmatically constructed by Chinese speakers who generally define advice-giving as a rapport-building behavior. The present study, therefore, investigated how Chinese language users rhetorically manage their unsolicited peer advice in an online learning activity. Also, whether and how the gender of the advice-givers and receivers exert impacts on the advice configurations in the formal institutional setting were examined. The corpus involved 1,118 units of advice speech events elicited from peer evaluations given by 43 Chinese-speaking Taiwanese students. The results revealed that the institutional context where the advice was addressed was critical to the advice-giver’s linguistic implicitness and selections of redressive modifiers. Besides, the gender of both the advice-givers and receivers had significant impacts on the pragmatics of the given advice. While the females often employed conditional constructions and reasoning discursive moves, the males preferred using subjectivizers to redress their advice, especially those addressed to men.