Learning Chinese in a study abroad context: The case of ritual congratulating

In this paper, we explore how and why the realisation of the ritual act of congratulating may turn out to be challenging for foreign learners of Chinese. Congratulating and other ceremonial ritual acts are not only used when someone participates in an actual ritual event: they are also required when they are mentioned in mundane events, like casual interactions when someone talks about a family birthday or wedding. We define congratulation as an interactional move and systematically examine its conventional realisation patterns through a typology of speech acts. We approach congratulating moves by combining a speech act-anchored analysis with the field of study abroad and interaction ritual research. The results of our analysis show that various ritual occasions may trigger different types of inappropriate uses of congratulating by foreign learners of Chinese.