do you speak fluent English?

Since you’re reading this blog, you are probably a fluent English speaker. I’ve recently received this inquiry from a graduate student in China, and she’d like your help in filling out this questionnaire. Here is the email request [sic] for your consideration to participate:

I am a third year graduate in Xi’an International Studies University (西安外国语大学） majoring in Modern Linguistics. And now I am working on my MA thesis, which is about the pragmatic transfer in Chinese EFL learners’ refusal speech act. Thus I need to collect the English from both the native English speakers and Chinese learners of English and then to make a comparison between the two groups. The questionnaire is taken from Beebe et al.(1990), which was a “Discourse Completion Test” and now I need to find some Americans, or at least English speakers (English as one’s mother tongue) to fill in those blanks provided. In the attachment there is the questionnaire, would you please have a look at it? And if possible,would you please ask your friends to do it for me at their convinience? I sincerely hope you can help me.

What I did to fill out this questionnaire is to copy/paste the web document into an email, and filled out my response. Send the completed questionnaire to [email protected]

The questionnaire is anonymous, so your name will not be published in any famous annals of thesis archives. It took me 15 minutes to fill out; you could probably finish faster.