Realization of the Speech Acts of Request and Apology by Middle Eastern EFL Learners

Abstract

The objective of this study was to investigate the request and apology strategies of Kurdish EFL undergraduate students (KEFLUS) and their linguistic and pragmatic competence in making requests and apologies. The participants were 83 KEFLUS and 14 native speakers of English (NSE). A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and rating scale developed by the researcher were used to collect the data. After the responses were collected, the data were coded and analysed according to the taxonomy of Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) Cross-Cultural Speech Acts Realization Patterns (CCSARP) for request and the Olshtain and Cohen (1983) taxonomy for apology. Furthermore, the collected data were rated by four researchers. The results of the study revealed the differences in responses between the KEFLUS and NSE groups and between the state and private universities. However, no significant difference was found between KEFLUS males and females. Moreover, the KEFLUS responses were in general pragmatically and structurally appropriate.