Analysis of appropriateness in a speech act of request in L2 English

This study investigates effects of general proficiency on production of refusals. Fifty-nine Japanese college students of English at two different proficiency levels (proficiency determined by TOEFL scores) were evaluated for their ability to produce a speech act of refusal in a spoken role play task. The task elicited four refusals (refusals to invitation, offer, request, and suggestion) in two item types: formal and informal situations. Learners' refusals were analyzed for overall appropriateness and fluency. Appropriateness was assessed quantitatively by rating performance on a six-point scale, as well as qualitatively by identifying the directness levels of the linguistic expressions used to produce refusals. Fluency was examined for speech rates (average number of words per minute). Results revealed a significant proficiency influence on both appropriateness and fluency, but only a marginal difference in the types of linguistic expressions used between the two proficiency groups. There was an interaction between proficiency and item type: proficiency effect was larger for formal situation refusals than for informal situation refusals on both appropriateness and fluency.1 IntroductionThe speech act of refusal is a face-threatening act because of its non-compliant nature. In a refusal to a directive (e.g., request, suggestion), the speaker averts a threat to her negative face, while a refusal to a commissive (e.g., offer, invitation) involves the speaker declining support of her positive face (Brown and Levinson, 1987). If they are not performed appropriately, refusals could lead to unintended offense and communication breakdown. As a result, it is important to examine if and/or how second language (L2) learners' refusal patterns might deviate from those of native speakers in order to account for potential causes of miscommunication and suggest ways to teach appropriate linguistic strategies involved in this speech act.This study investigates the effects of general proficiency on production of refusals. Fifty-nine Japanese college students of English at two different proficiency levels (determined by TOEFL scores) were evaluated for their ability to produce a speech act of refusal in role-plays. The task elicited four refusals (refusals to invitation, offer, request, and suggestion) in formal and informal situations. Learners' refusals were analyzed for overall appropriateness and fluency. Appropriateness was assessed quantitatively by rating performance on a six-point scale, as well as qualitatively by identifying the directness levels of the linguistic expressions used to produce refusals. Fluency was examined for speech rates (average number of words per minute). Results revealed a significant proficiency influence on appropriateness and fluency. There was an interaction between proficiency and item type: the effect of proficiency was larger for formal situation refusals than for informal situation refusals on both appropriateness and fluency.2 BackgroundPrevious studies that examined interlanguage patterns of refusals typically used a categorical analysis by comparing native and non-native refusal strategies for their directness levels based on coding systems (e.g., Al-Eryani, 2007; Beebe, Takahashi and Uliss-Weltz, 1990; Felix-Brasdefer, 2003; Fujiura, 2007; Garcia, 1999; Ikeda, 2007; Kawate-Mierzejewska, 2009; Robinson, 1992; Takahashi and Beebe, 1987; Widjaja, 1997). An earlier study by Takahashi and Beebe (1987) examined pragmatic transfer in Japanese ESL learners' refusals. Using a discourse completion test (DCT), the researchers compared the differences in the order, frequency, and content of refusal strategies between American and Japanese students. They found evidence of LI transfer in all three areas. Frequency of transfer interacted with proficiency. Low-proficiency learners were more direct in their refusals than high-proficiency learners, suggesting their lack of pragmalinguistic knowledge. …

Abstract
 The theory of speech act contributed by Austin in 1962 has received much consideration in linguistic study. The main objective of this paper is to account for the ways whereby speakers express various actions via language. Accordingly, the current study tries to find answers to the following questions: (1) what is speech act theory? (2) what are the main classifications of speech act theory? (3) what is speech act of request , why it is made, and how it is achieved? The current study aims at: (1) presenting an illustration of speech acts (2) exploring the main classifications of speech acts (3) investigating the essence of speech act of request , the ways whereby it is achieved, and the reasons behind that. The study hypothesizes that (1) speech act denotes the verbal behaviour or the action which is done by the utterance or sentence uttered by a speaker in a certain occasion (2) Austin classifies speech acts into performative and constativeExpositions, whereas Searle states that there are three main acts performed in speech act including ;utterance act , propositional act and illocutionary act (3) speech act of request is an act asked by the speaker and accomplished by the hearer for the benefit of the speaker . There are three basic types of sentences by which speech act of request is made ; declaratives , imperatives, interrogatives. To achieve politeness interrogative sentences are the most recurrent ones so as to mitigate the impact of the action.
 The Procedures followed are: (1) presenting a theoretical background of speech acts. (2) highlighting the primary classifications of speech acts (3) elucidating speech act of request, the ways by which it is fulfilled and the grounds that explicate its use. The study is limited to speech act of request in the short story "The Happy Prince " written by Oscar Wilde.
 Section one exhibits the problem of the study exposing its aims, hypotheses, procedures and limits. Section two represents a theoretical framework including Austin’s Classification of speech acts, the speech act of request, schemes of requesting, sentence kinds denoting request. Section three depicts the data and its analysis. The study ends with a section for its conclusions.

This study attempted to explore the possible impacts of teaching English pragmatic features to Iranian high school students’ use of request speech acts. To this end, a sample of Iranian female high school students (n=50) between 12 to 18 years range of age participated in the study. The students with the same level of proficiency were assigned into two experimental and control groups. The data were collected by administering Multiple-Choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT) as both the pre and the post-tests. The pragmatic features were selected from the high school English textbooks and the excerpts taken from the Top Notch series (2A, 3A, 2B). With the focus on request speech acts, the control group received conventional instructions whereas the experimental group was exposed to the researchers’ request speech act interventions. After statistical analysis of the findings, the data revealed that teaching pragmatic features has significant impact on the Iranian high school students’ performance on request speech acts. Besides, the overall responses by the experimental group showed that indirect request speech acts were more widely used than direct request speech acts as the sign of social and cultural politeness.

Presently, the control to master the English language has become prominent in academia, research and commercial attention. Therefore, many non-English speaking countries, including Arab countries such as Iraq, are striving to develop their education systems in teaching pragmatic aspects as speech act of request in classroom, and speech act of request is an essential aspect to boost English communication among Arab learners. Furthermore, in Arab countries as in Iraq, there is a lack of usage of speech act of request among students of English as a foreign language which affects the learning process of students. As such, teaching pragmatic aspect, particularly teaching speech act of requests, are emerging as the best way to create enthusiasm in learning new languages. Therefore, the paper was presented by a public syllabus lead that prioritizes the need for English learners to improve their ability to utilize speech act of request positively in social and cultural communications. Moreover, Many English learners fail to present pragmatic ability on how to understand speech act of request by relating utterances to their meanings, knowing the intention of language users, and how speech act of request is utilized in definite contexts. There is growing material of researches on usage of speech act of request for EFL schoolroom teaching. However, researchers have pointed to concentrate on the traditional approaches rather than how English learners require or understand how make speech act of request for developing the students' production of request in the EFL schoolroom. The usage of speech act of request and methods of teaching English to these Iraqi learners have been discussed in details of the current paper. Keywords: Usage of Speech Act of Request, Iraqi Learners’ Problems. DOI : 10.7176/JEP/10-4-07

This study focuses on the speech act of requests, specifically on the alerters. An ‘alerter’ refers to the discourse feature used in initiating a conversation or the getting attention of the hearer. Request as a speech act is much investigated for its Head Acts and Supportive Moves, however, alerter as one of its initial discourse features has not been much looked into. In the context of contrastive pragmatics study on the Malay language in Malaysia, the study of alerters in request has yet to be explored. Hence, the aim of this study is as follows: 1 - to classify the Malay categories of alerters by Malaysian Malay speakers, and 2 – to compare them with alerters in the English language. The participants consist of 400 native speakers’ of Malays from a central city and a rural area, aged between 12 to 56 years old, and varied in social backgrounds. The data was collected via Discourse Completion Task within a span of 3 months, and also coded and analysed using the framework of Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) by Blum-Kulka & Olshtain (1984). The findings revealed 10 categories of alerters by Malay speakers. The findings also indicated similarities and differences in the categories of Malay alerters and English alerters which could be the result of intercultural fusion in the sociopragmatis of doing requests within English, and the languages in Malaysia with the Malay language. Keywords: Alerters; English Requests; Malay Requests; Sociopragmatics competence; contrastive pragmatics

Politeness strategies that speakers deploy when performing a speech act have been seen to be influenced by several factors among which gender and socioeconomic status are two prominent ones. The current study was an attempt to examine the relationship between gender and socioeconomic status (SES) on one hand, and choice of politeness strategies on the other. The focus was specifically on the realization of speech act of request in Persian (L1) and English (L2). The participants were 100 advanced-level Iranian EFL students. Based on their gender and responses to the socioeconomic status questionnaire, they were divided into four equal groups of twenty-five: 1. male-high; 2. male-low; 3. female-high; and 4. female-low. The data collection instruments were the English and Persian versions of a discourse completion test (DCT). The results revealed a significant relationship between gender and use of politeness strategies in speech act of request in L1 as well as L2. The findings, however, demonstrated no significant relationship between the participants’ socioeconomic status and their use of politeness strategy neither in L1 nor in L2. This study can be another proof for Brown and Levinson’s claim about the universality of politeness strategies.

The present study investigated the extent to which two instructional paradigms—explicit vs. implicit instruction—affect learners’ ability to use the speech act of request in English. Ninety homogenous adult Iranian intermediate EFL learners attending a language school in Isfahan, Iran, were randomly assigned to three groups: Explicit Group (EG), Implicit Group (IG) and Control Group (CG)). A pre-test was given to the three groups to measure the participants’ ability to use requests prior to any treatment. Then, all the groups were exposed to short conversations (audio and script) including certain requests. However, while the EG received explicit and deductive instruction by means of direct awareness-raising tasks and metapragmatic explanations, the IG was provided only with typographical enhancement of the request strategies in focus. The students in the CG did not receive any instruction. The results of the post-test, administered after the treatment, indicated that both explicit and implicit instruction exert a significant effect on the learners’ production of request strategies in English. It was also found that participants who received explicit instruction outperformed those in the implicit group; however; the observed difference was not statistically significant. Accordingly, it can be claimed that an implicit and unobtrusive method such as input enhancement can be as effective as explicit instruction which requires the execution of various awareness-raising tasks and explanation of metapragmatic information.

Korean language has a complicate system of Request Speech Acts which makes a lot of difficulties for foreign students learning Korean. Hence, a study on the realization patterns of Korean Request Speech Acts and how to choose the right pattern become very important. This study aims to examine the uses of Korean Request Speech Acts of Korean female around twenties and thirties by using the Korean drama corpus. And we also investigated the context factors of the patterns of high frequence.We found out that all of the Korean imperative sentences, interrogative sentences, declarative sentences and proposative sentences can be used to express the Request Speech Acts. Also people choose the pattern by the standards of formality, intimacy, authority, gender and (family) relationship. But usually, people use the Request Speech Acts when they talk to close friends in unofficial places.

There are relatively many researches on request speech acts of the various fields of Korean education, but many of them employed a questionnaire-type discourse completion test for data collection and thus provided no information on how Korean learners actually made request speech acts in a spoken language environment. Although a discourse completion test is useful for examining the patterns and strategies of using polite expressions by many learners according to their social relationships, it is difficult to get an overall picture of how the primary and auxiliary speech acts are performed in request speech acts with such a test. It is also difficult to discuss whether request expressions learned by many learners can be put to immediate use in a spoken language situation with a discourse completion test since it is a writing task in many cases. This study thus set out to examine how request expressions and strategies learned in the classroom were utilized and whether there would be differences in expressions and strategies according to the content of request by analyzing the materials of learners who performed a task of leaving a message by phone in order to supplement the lacking aspects of a discourse completion test suggested in previous discussions.

This article presents a discussion about the inclusion of video game based pragmatic competence instruction as a facilitative tool to develop interlanguage pragmatic competence of Iranian EFL learners' acquisition of speech acts of apology and request. The question this article is intended to answer includes: whether using video game as a facilitative tool for developing interlanguage pragmatic competence have any effect on EFL learners’ acquisition of speech acts of apology and request or not. To answer this question, 40 Iranian intermediate EFL learners were selected via administering the Oxford Placement Test (OPT). Following the Jianda Liu pragmatic competence test (2004) that made test of apology and request speech acts were administered as the pre-test before the targeted speech acts were instructed to them for 8 sessions. The post-test of apology and request speech acts were then administered and data were analyzed via calculating ANCOVA and Mann-Whitney U test. The results indicated that the video game-based instructed EFL classroom showed positive progress in acquisition of apology and request speech acts.

Speech Act is communication activity which contains the intent to be conveyed when speaking (the illocutionary power of an utterance) and the effect the speaker wants to achieve (perlocutionary speech). In the sale and purchase of sand mining on the banks of the Sariak River, Padang Pariaman Regency, there is a speech act between the miner and the buyer of the sand. The researcher wants to reveal the lexicon and meaning in speech acts as linguistic documentation and the richness of the lexicon. The purpose of this research is to develop linguistics in a sociopragmatic perspective. The theory used in this study is the theory of speech acts in sociopragmatic science. In this study the author uses a qualitative approach. The researcher found the syntactic aspect in the form of words and sentences. The syntactic form found is in the form of nouns that turn into adverbs due to changes in meaning in speech acts based on the context. Then find the sentence mode in the speech act of request by using declarative and interrogative sentences/questions, and using terms and language that are in accordance with the social context of interaction and culture of the community, so that efficient communication is achieved.

The aim of this research is to find the request strategies and modifiers used by the students from Jakarta, Bangka-Belitung, and Pontianak while they are making requests. Those three places – Jakarta, Pontianak, and Bangka - Belitung – are chosen since the majority of the students come from those three places. It is expected that by understanding students from different origins in making requests, misunderstanding can be avoided. The respondents are 45 students studying in an English Department in a university in Jakarta. 15 of them are from Jakarta, other 15 students are from Pontianak, and the other 15 students are from Bangka-Belitung. The data is collected by delivering a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) to the respondents. The DCT contains 6 scenarios which cover the different powers and social distances. The respondents have to produce a speech act of request of each scenario. The results of this research show that the students from Jakarta, Pontianak, and Bangka - Belitung are applying the similar request strategies. Regarding the modifiers used, the students from Bangka - Belitung are using the most external downgraders, followed by the students from Pontianak. When the power is high, none of the students from Jakarta are using the external downgraders while the students from Pontianak and Bangka Belitung use them a lot. Keywords : speech act of request, modifier

Through conversation ones establish relationship with others and keep channels open for further relationships. Politeness strategies and issues have been the focus of a number of studies. The way ones request for something to others depends on some factors such as the context they are in and the interlocutors they talk to. This article aims at developing the latest discussion on politeness phenomena by paying attention to the specifics of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) settings specifically an online discussion forum. This article attempts to identify how speech act of request is performed in Top Law School (TLS) online discussion forum. The data were analyzed to observe the forms of speech act of request and the types of speech act of request performed in the online discussion forum. The findings of this paper revealed that the forms of speech act of request are expressed by declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentence. Moreover, the types of speech act of request employed by the users are directive, indirective, and literal speech acts. The writer believes that the study will be beneficial and a good reference for future researchers in conducting research on pragmatics under the same topic. Hopefully, it will enrich readers’ knowledge and understanding of the speech act of request and the politeness in CMC.

This chapter provides a practical introduction for instructors who are interested in teaching pragmatic awareness with the aid of short movie clips. Pragmatic and intercultural competence should arguably be a central focus in the language classroom. However, it can often be difficult to recreate genuine pragmatic situations in the classroom. Furthermore, commercial textbooks are often text-based, and unable to represent non-verbal features such as tone of voice, gestures, and laughter. The chapter specifically focuses on (a) the speech act of requests; and (b) the comprehension of sarcasm. At the intermediate level, L2 users are expected to be able to accomplish social actions in a range of situations. Requests are a highly useful social action and serve as an example of how speech acts can be taught in the classroom using video. Comprehending sarcasm is a notoriously difficult skill to acquire in a second language. Possible functions of sarcasm are described, along with activities that promote reflection and L1 usage comparison. The chapter provides concrete examples of movie clips and activities that have been used in the Japanese EFL classroom, but would also likely be useful in other contexts. The process of identifying suitable video clips is clearly explained, and a simple corpus-based tool is introduced (bit.ly/movieclipfinder) to aid interested instructors who wish to source their own movie clips.

In Iran the age of learning English as a foreign language is decreasing yearly. It is obvious that learning English at a very early age is a most appropriate time to start. The investigation in this study is focused on the speech act of request. Instructional effects of learning request strategies are assessed in preschoolers who received instruction to find out whether the exposure to the foreign language learning enhances the development of request strategy use and brings about changes in their first language strategy use features. The data were collected from 10 preschool Iranian learners of English as a foreign language. The participants of the study took a two-semester speaking course in an academic setting in Iran. The study had a pretest and posttest design in which 10 conversations were used including polite request strategies of English to analyze instructional effects on the learners’ first language after the posttest, by comparing and measuring the backward transfer against the pretest results. The oral task was in the form of role plays which were also utilized for communicative practice with the learners. The data were rated for the extent of a foreign language effect on the first language by experienced tutors and linguistic analyses were done to identify the foreign language components of request strategies features in the first language production. Results showed that frequent use of English request strategy features in the first language was an indication of L2 students’ beneficial experience in their L1.