Investigation into Strategies of Requests and Mitigation Used by Palestinian English Language Learners

Abstract

This study investigates the strategies of request speech act used by Palestinian EFL learners at the school level and the effect of the gender variable on strategy use. Moreover, strategies used to mitigate requests were investigated. Data was collected for this study through completion of Discourse Completion Tasks (DCT). A DCT was designed, consisting of (8) situations, with different social status levels between the participants. The DCT was completed by a sample of (69) EFL learners at the American School in Beit Jala. The researchers adopted Blum-Kulka’s (1989) method in coding and analyzing the data. The findings revealed that some strategies were employed more often than the other strategies. Furthermore, the learners used few strategies to mitigate requests. The findings revealed gaps in learners’ pragmatic competence that call for remediation through designing extra materials that expose the learners to the different strategies that realize speech acts. Finally the findings showed that there is no statistically significant difference in the employment of the strategies due to gender. Further research should be conducted on other English speech acts besides requests, taking into account the effect of social variables, such as social power and distance, on strategy use.