Abstract
This longitudinal study empirically investigated the development of request strategies in Iranian study abroaders. More specifically, this study aimed at exploring if length of stay in L2 context impacts learners’ number and type of strategies. To this end, 72 students who registered in a six month study abroad program and 60 native speakers from U.S. Britain, Australia, and Canada agreed to participate in the present study. The learners in this investigation were tested at three phases. In the first phase, the study abroad (SA) group was given a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) at the beginning of the program as a pre-test. Three months later the same test was administered to the learners as post-test 1 and subsequently at the end of the program once again the test was given to the learners as post-test 2 in order to measure their achievement after three and six months sojourn. The native speakers were also asked to fill the DCT in order to compare the learners’ responses to the native speakers’. Finally, through comparing the learners’ performances in pre-test and post-tests with each other and with the native speakers’, it was found out that first , majority of learners and native speakers used conventionally indirect strategies in their request utterances, second , the number of strategies used by the students steadily increased over time from pre-test to the first and second post-test and third , the type of request strategies used by learners changed to be native like at the end of their sojourn.
Highlights
Long time ago, linguists and language philosophers recognized that language is not merely used to describe things and events, but it is used to do certain things such as requesting, apologizing, complaining, praising, etc. Golato and Golato (2013) describe speech acts as “the acts a speaker performs when uttering a sentence under normal circumstances” (p. 5332)
A simple comparison of the average number of strategies shows that the study abroad (SA) learners achieved some gains in post-test 1 after three months and their strategy repertoire increased in number after six months and they steadily moved toward being native like
The elicited data in this study revealed that the number of strategies used by the SA learners increased subsequently in post-test 1 and post-test 2
Summary
Linguists and language philosophers recognized that language is not merely used to describe things and events, but it is used to do certain things such as requesting, apologizing, complaining, praising, etc. Golato and Golato (2013) describe speech acts as “the acts a speaker performs when uttering a sentence under normal circumstances” (p. 5332). Golato and Golato (2013) describe speech acts as “the acts a speaker performs when uttering a sentence under normal circumstances” Among the list of speech acts, request is the most frequent one and is mostly used to start conversations. A request is an illocutionary act through which a speaker asks the hearer to perform an act for the speaker. In this speech act, the requester asks the requestee to carry out something. Whenever a request is asked, because the requester is showing power by requesting, the requestee’s negative face (i.e. the wish to be unimpeded) is threatened. If the hearer refuses to carry out the required act, the speaker is eminent to lose face
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