In this chapter, we bring the reader into a higherlevel of our analytic system, namely the study ofspeech acts and interactional acts. Thus far we havefocused on how particular expressions indicatespeech acts. However, speech acts themselves do notexist in a vacuum, but rather they tend to realisemore complex interactional phenomena, which wedefine in this book as interactional acts. As weargued in Chapter 3, unlike speech acts,interactional acts are infinite, and theiracquisition can trigger noteworthy L2 pragmaticproblems.

As a case study, we investigate how Chinese nativespeakers and foreign learners of Chinese evaluateinstances of the interactional act of criticising.By criticising we mean disciplinary acts throughwhich lecturers criticise their students forviolating the classroom order. In our view,criticising is not a speech act but rather aninteractional act. As a conventionalisedinteractional act, criticising is realised by acluster of expressions and speech acts. Followingour approach, we examine such realisation patternsin a bottom-up way, in order to find out exactlywhich aspects of criticising may trigger L2 learningdifficulties. In studying such difficulties, we makeuse of our framework outlined in Chapter 3 alreadyin a fully-fledged way. That is, our analysisdeparts from an actual L2 pragmatic issueexperienced by the second author of this book. Wethen investigate this issue first by conducting acontrastive pragmatic study of DCT corpora, followedby an L2 pragmatic inquiry involving a rating task.In the analysis we build on what has been presentedto the reader thus far, i.e. we involve both RFIEsand speech acts in our inquiry.