Under the framework of Leech’s Politeness Principle, this paper aims to
investigate Chinese college English learners’ response to Chinese compliments with the
implementation of the discourse completion test (DCT). By comparing the response
strategies between the male and female participants with different English proficiency,
it is found that there exists a positive correlation between the compliment acceptance
and the participants’ English proficiency, namely the participants’ with higher English
proficiency tend to accept compliments. The gender differences in the response
strategies of compliments are also identified. The final results prove the existence of
backward transferring effects of second language on mother tongue from a pragmatic
perspective. The findings of this study provide some pedagogical implications for
college English classroom teaching instruction as well.