English Requests Research Articles

Speech Act of Request :A Contrastive Study Between EFL And ESL Undergraduate Students

This study explored the English request strategies and modifiers used by Malaysian and Saudi undergraduates. It also investigated the influence of social power and social distance on their choice of those strategies. Fifty Malaysian ESL and fifty Saudi EFL undergraduates participated in it. A discourse completion task was used to collect the data. Blum-Kulka et al.'s (1989) taxonomy was used to analyse request strategies and Martinez-Flor and Uso-Juan’s (2006) taxonomy was used to analyse request modifiers. Data was collected and analyzed quantitatively. The findings revealed that pragmatic competence varied according to context. Malaysian students in an English as a second language environment used more Conventionally Indirect request strategies than Saudi students did in an English as a foreign language environment. Non-Conventionally Indirect strategies were not used by Malaysians and were employed least often by Saudis. Social status and social distance had no significant influence on their use of request strategies. The study concluded by providing implications for English teachers to foster pragmatic competence among undergraduate students.

РОЛЬ ИСКУССТВЕННОГО ИНТЕЛЛЕКТА В БИЗНЕСЕ

Small businesses play a vital role in the fabric of any economy. The Small Business Administration recognizes their significant contributions to economic growth, job creation, innovation, and overall prosperity. These businesses, although small in scale and often privately owned, have significant value compared to larger corporations. The definition of a small business can vary from country to country and industry to industry, encompassing factors such as the number of employees, annual revenue, and assets. Although various AI technologies are used quite often in everyday life (72% of respondents use voice assistants, smart gadgets, or automatic control of home appliances), less than half of respondents (45%) have used AI in their work processes in the past year. The most popular tasks are creative ones, which usually take up a lot of employees' operational time. For example, instead of recording a meeting and then spending several hours transcribing it, speech recognition technologies are used to translate it into text. Communication with customers can be simplified with the help of smart voice assistants. In order to find analogues of your products, it is not necessary to physically go around all competitors, sometimes it is enough to upload a photo to the image recognition and analysis service. However, only 19% of entrepreneurs used the capabilities of chatbots in their work that can support a dialogue, or virtual assistants that make an action plan and write a scenario, 4% of entrepreneurs tried to work with a neural network that understands requests in Russian and English, can mix images, mix images and text, create different versions of images, and also redraw individual objects and areas in pictures. 78% of entrepreneurs who used artificial intelligence technologies in their work consider them useful for their activities. Among the main advantages, respondents noted the release of employee time for other tasks (56%), high speed of execution (50%) and money savings (35%).

The Interplay of Contextual Variables and Language Proficiency in Request Realization

The significance of producing socially appropriate utterances, not just linguistically correct ones, has given rise to a plethora of studies on speech acts. In this regard, the performance of second and foreign language learners against the norms of the target language and the factors affecting them have yet to be thoroughly investigated. To contribute to this ongoing research, this study aimed to elicit pragmatic requestive features of Iranian EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners with respect to (a) request directness, (b) request perspective, (c) internal modification, and (d) external modification in eight social situations. This study also examined whether language proficiency and two contextual factors of social power and social distance affect Iranian EFL learners’ requests in English. Participants were a total of 60 university students or graduates who had taken TOEFL in the past 2 years and were thus categorized into low and high proficiency levels. A Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) was employed to elicit requests. To achieve the objectives of this study, both descriptive statistics and two-way ANOVA were employed. The results showed a significant main effect for contextual factors; participants’ choice of requestive features was affected by the two social factors of power and distance. Proficiency, however, did not have a significant effect on the pragmatic performance of participants. The findings of this study showed pragmatic development of participants on the one hand and some evidence of their underdeveloped pragmatic performance on the other hand, which makes explicit instruction a necessity.

Revisiting the relationships of n-gram measures to L2 writing proficiency: Comparisons between genres and connections to vocabulary levels

The effect of multiword sequences on L2 writing proficiency among different genres and their relations to vocabulary levels are understudied. In this study 60 indices of bigrams and trigrams related to frequency, association, range and proportion of frequent n-grams were employed to analyze 600 rated English essays and 600 rated English request letters composed by Chinese high school students. We investigated whether there were similar or varied n-gram measures predictive of their holistic scores among the two genres and the relationship between specific multiword combinations connected to the n-gram measures predictive of writing scores and their vocabulary levels in the Chinese national English curriculum. The results showed that three pairs of similar n-gram measures predicted the holistic scores among these two types of writings, but five indices were uniquely associated with letter scores. Additionally, in both genres, higher mean MI associations in more proficient compositions were significantly correlated to more multiword combinations containing words from college and graduate levels in advanced writings than in intermediate writings. This study contributed to a better understanding of the relations among word associations, vocabulary levels and writing proficiency among high school student English writings.

Game-Informed Approach to Teaching Request-Making in English

Game-based instruction has been praised as an effective approach to second language (L2) development, as it can provide a low-stakes, fun, and engaging learning environment. However, in designing digital games for L2 learning, it is important to consider how various game designs and mechanics can affect learning gains. In the current study building on Taguchi (2023), a digital game-informed application was developed to teach 118 L2 English learners to identify and produce pragmatically appropriate requests in English. Two versions of the game were developed that differed only in one designed game mechanic: version A allowed learners to see one single reaction from interlocutors after selecting one option from a set of request forms. In contrast, version B allowed learners to see the full range of interlocutor reactions across all items in the same set of request form options. Results indicate that both versions of the game had positive effects on learners’ pragmatics knowledge. The difference in learners’ gains between the two versions of the app had negligible to small effect size (Cohen’s d) differences on both the recognition and production knowledge of the learners. Implications are discussed, offering direction for future research aiming to measure the effects of targeted game mechanics implemented in educational technology

When two cultures meet

The present study investigated the use of strategies by Chinese learners of English and English learners of Chinese in making requests in both Chinese and English. Three factors affecting request strategies were also examined, including social power, social distance and degree of imposition. A total of 12 Chinese-speaking and 12 English-speaking students were recruited to complete Chinese and English versions of an oral discourse completion task (ODCT). Request behaviour was examined in both the subjects’ native and non-native languages. The results show that the learner and native speaker groups performed differently in making Chinese requests but employed comparable strategies in making English requests. Moreover, social distance was found to be more influential than social power and degree of imposition in making Chinese requests. However, the influence of these factors was similar in making English requests. The findings suggest that it was easier for the learners of Chinese to master English requests than for the learners of English to acquire Chinese requests.

Iranian EFL Learners’ Production of Online English Requests: Effects of Technology-Mediated Task-Based Instruction

This quasi-experimental study scrutinized the impact of technology-mediated TBLT in an online collaborative and individual EFL learning environment on the development of request production of 20 male and female B.A. students of TEFL. The participants were divided into two equal individual and collaborative experimental groups to receive online video-prompt task-based instruction on request speech act production in six distinct situations defined based on different contextual variables including distance, power, and imposition. Two similar versions of video-prompt Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs) focusing on six situations covered in online classes were given to the participants as a pretest and posttest. The results indicated that both groups’ request speech act production improved significantly after the intervention. However, there was no significant difference between the performance of the two groups. It was then concluded that both techniques are facilitative in boosting students’ pragmatic competence; however, more time is required to find out the extent to which these techniques differ in terms of their productiveness.

Requests and apologies in two languages among bilingual speakers: A comparison of heritage English speakers and English- and Hebrew-dominant bilinguals.

Linguistic research over the last two decades has uncovered a significant number of properties that identify heritage language (HL) speakers as a particular phenomenon within bilingualism. However, despite the rapid development of HL research, the sphere of HL speech act pragmatics is still in its infancy. The current study sought to cover part of this gap by investigating both languages of HL adult speakers for whom English is their HL and Hebrew is their dominant societal language (SL; n = 20, hereafter HS) in comparison with two other groups: Hebrew-dominant speakers who were born to Hebrew-speaking families and raised in Israel, and thus English is the language of their schooling (n = 20, hereafter HEB-D), and English-dominant speakers who were born to English-speaking families and immigrated to Israel from an English-speaking country after the age of 18, and thus Hebrew is their L2 (n = 20, hereafter ENG-D). The discourse-pragmatic tasks in English and in Hebrew consisted of the same 36 scenarios eliciting requests and apologies in each language. Each request was followed by an apology that is related. The results indicated that Hebrew-dominant speakers and English-dominant speakers, i.e., HEB-D and ENG-D, had different strategies for the realization of requests and apologies which they systematically transferred from their dominant language into their weaker one, confirming the cross-cultural and cross-linguistic differences between request and apology realizations in English and in Hebrew. However, the picture was more complex for the HL speakers in their HL-English and SL-Hebrew as in some cases their strategies paired up with the ENG-D in English, and with the HEB-D in Hebrew, while in other cases they developed a unique and hybrid linguistic style reflecting the strategies of both languages. The investigation of both languages of HL speakers enabled us to compare features of the two linguistic systems and make conclusions about their nature.

Requesting on WhatsApp: The interplay of interactional competence and deontics in English as an additional language

This exploratory study focuses on changes in the accomplishment of requests by an adult English as an additional language speaker/learner interacting on WhatsApp for nine months. The analysis follows a microanalytic approach to digital interaction informed by recent developments within longitudinal conversation analysis. It unpacks the array of semiotic and interactional resources that the focal learner employs to make class-related requests to the teacher. Longitudinal comparison of four request sequences over time suggests that the differences in how the requesting posts are designed and responded to index both increased interactional competence to accomplish requests in English on WhatsApp - through more contextually-sensitive and conventional semiotic resources - as well as evolving socio-interactional ties and related deontic concerns between the learner and the teacher. Despite the popularity of text chats, only a handful of studies have investigated the practices employed by additional language learners to engage in text chat interaction change over time and this work has not focused on naturally occurring interactions or on requesting. The present study thereby contributes new understandings to text chat interaction with additional language speakers and to longitudinal research on interactional competence development in online settings.

Sudanese University Students’ Arabic and English Request Modifiers

This study has aimed at studying request modifications produced by Sudanese university students in Arabic and English. It has compared and contrasted the pragmatic features in the production of the subjects in the two languages in an attempt to identify the universal and culture-specific ones. It attempted to classify the modifiers used by the subjects. It also tried to find out subjects’ preferences of the different modification types and the reasons behind them. The subjects were two hundred students who responded to Arabic and English Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs).
 The study showed that the subjects used a shared group of universal modifications that included eleven internal modifiers and six external ones when responding to the two DCTs. It has been found that the subjects preferred to use interrogatives, politeness devices, past tenses, grounders, and checking on availability more than the others. They did not use negations and downtoners in Arabic and used embedded if-clauses, consultative devices, and hedges sparsely. It also revealed other culture-specific types that did not appear in the Cross-Cultural Speech Acts Realization Project (CCSARP)i.e. alternatives, religious appealing markers, and other types of speech acts. The subjects’ choices were determined by linguistic, social, cultural, religious, and contextual factors.

المعرفة الاستيعابية والإنتاجية للطلب من قبل متعلمي اللغة الإنجليزية كلغة أجنبية في جامعة الكوفة

إن فعل الطلب هو احد أهم الأفعال الكلامية في اللغة وان استخدامه بشكل الدقيق من قبل المتعلمين للغة الانجليزية إنما يدل على اكتسابهم القدر اللازم من المعرفة. إلا أن عدد كبير منهم لا يعكسون ذلك فيما يخص استخدام فعل الطلب. إذا جاءت هذه الدراسة لتحديد ما هي الأنماط المختلفة للطلب التي يستخدمها طلبة الجامعة, بينما تبرز أوجه الصعوبات في طرح واستيعاب هذا الفعل الكلامي من قبلهم, وتقييم استخدامهم له, و فيما إذا كان هناك أي تأثير للغة الأم_ أي العربية _على ذلك. وتفترض الدراسة لأجل ذلك كله إن الطلبة العراقيين كمتعلمين أجانب للغة الانجليزية, لا يمتلكون القدر اللازم من المعرفة لاستيعاب و طرح فعل الطلب في اللغة الانجليزية هذا أولا. ثانيا إن مستوى أدائهم أفضل في استيعاب فعل الطلب من ما هو الحال في طرحه. و تفترض الدراسة أيضا إن هؤلاء الطلبة ومهما اختلف الموقف يكررون استخدام ذات الأنماط للتعبير عن الطلب, لإلمامهم بعدد محدد من أنماطه. ولبرهنت مدى مصداقية هذه الفرضيات من عدمها تبنيت الدراسة الإجراءات التالية: (1) عرض الإطار النظري لنظرية فعل الكلام و مبادئ التأدب اللغوي ومحاور أخرى ذات صلة بفعل الطلب. (2) إدارة اختبار ذو شقين لقياس مستوى طلبه جامعه الكوفة/ كليه الآداب/ قسم اللغة الانجليزية في استيعاب وطرح فعل الطلب. (3) إجراء عدد من العمليات الإحصائية التي تبرهن صحة الفرضيات أعلاه أو تدحضها. وفي الختام تم التوصل إلى عدد من الاستنتاجات والتوصيات العلمية.

A CROSS-CULTURAL AND INTERLANGUAGE STUDY OF REQUESTS IN THE KAZAKH AND ENGLISH LANGUAGES

This paper provides some (more) insights into cross-cultural variation in speech act realization by analyzing English, Kazakh, Chinese and other languages requests. It aims to shows that the relationship between indirectness and politeness is interpreted differently across cultures.

Primary pre-service teachers’ awareness of politeness in English requests

Politeness in English requests is associated with particular linguistic features such as mood, tense, negation, modals, and lexical markers. This study investigates the extent to which primary pre-service teachers are aware of English syntactic or lexical features that increase or decrease the degree of politeness in communicative interactions. Pre-service teachers (n = 42) and English natives (n = 15) as a reference group were asked to rate the degree of politeness of twenty request forms which vary across five linguistic features (mood, tense, negation, lexical markers, and suggestives). Analysis of the questionnaire revealed that the majority of the pre-service teachers are unaware of pragmalinguistics of English politeness, showing significantly different response patterns from the reference group. Specifically, they underestimated the effects of mood distinctions (imperatives vs. interrogatives) and negation on politeness while overestimating the contributions of the politeness marker, please, and the past tense modal verb, could, to politeness. Some causes of their limited pragmalinguistic knowledge are discussed, and some suggestions are made for pre-service teacher education to foster their pragmatic competence.

Requests in Indian and Sri Lankan English

AbstractDespite notable exceptions, research on requests in world Englishes has so far largely involved role plays, questionnaires and discourse completion tasks. Moreover, research on requests in South Asian varieties of English is rather scarce. Therefore, the present study employs a multifactorial approach towards requests in Indian and Sri Lankan English as compared to their historical input variety British English by investigating the spoken components of the International Corpus of English, hence involving authentic, non‐intuition‐based empirical data. Based on a conditional inference tree and a random forest extended via the integration of interaction predictors, the present article concludes that quantitative differences in the realisation patterns of requests in British, Indian and Sri Lankan English can be observed.

The Effect of Gender on the Bilingual and Bicultural Identity of the Iraqi EFL Learners' Recognition and Production of Request

This study examines the effect of gender on students' bilingual and bicultural identity in their recognition and production of request is studied. This means that it investigates to what extent the learners’ mother tongue and culture influence their recognition and production of request in the EFL and the effect of gender on such an identity. The study aims at exploring and identifying the linguistic patterns of request in English used by Iraqi EFL learners, those patterns of request transferred from Iraqi EFL learners’ mother tongue, and the Iraqi EFL learners’ cultural patterns and cultural realization of request transferred from Arabic culture into the EFL. Some hypotheses of the study state that there is a bilingual and cultural identity in using request by Iraqi EFL learners, females are better than males in request perception and production and they are worse in Arabic monolingualism and monoculturalism, students are better in English monolingualism and monoculturalism than in the other request features, students’ English monolingual and monocultural identity is more apparent in request perception than in production.
 To validate or refute its hypotheses, a test comprising recognition and production has been constructed and applied to fifty Iraqi EFL learners at fourth year, Department of English, College of Education for Humanities, University of Thi-Qar at the academic year (2020-2021). After data analysis, some conclusions are arrived at.
 The study concludes that Iraqi EFL learners are pragmatically incompetent and they have a bilingual and bicultural identity because of their mother tongue and culture interference.

Towards Aircraft Maintenance Metaverse Using Speech Interactions with Virtual Objects in Mixed Reality.

Metaverses embedded in our lives create virtual experiences inside of the physical world. Moving towards metaverses in aircraft maintenance, mixed reality (MR) creates enormous opportunities for the interaction with virtual airplanes (digital twin) that deliver a near-real experience, keeping physical distancing during pandemics. 3D twins of modern machines exported to MR can be easily manipulated, shared, and updated, which creates colossal benefits for aviation colleges who still exploit retired models for practicing. Therefore, we propose mixed reality education and training of aircraft maintenance for Boeing 737 in smart glasses, enhanced with a deep learning speech interaction module for trainee engineers to control virtual assets and workflow using speech commands, enabling them to operate with both hands. With the use of the convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for audio features and learning and classification parts for commands and language identification, the speech module handles intermixed requests in English and Korean languages, giving corresponding feedback. Evaluation with test data showed high accuracy of prediction, having on average 95.7% and 99.6% on the F1-Score metric for command and language prediction, respectively. The proposed speech interaction module in the aircraft maintenance metaverse further improved education and training, giving intuitive and efficient control over the operation, enhancing interaction with virtual objects in mixed reality.

A comparative study of animation versus static effects in the spatial concept-based metaphor awareness-raising approach on EFL learners’ cognitive processing of request strategies

abstractThis study evaluates the relative effects of two cognitive linguistic approaches – using animated versus static scenes in an illustration based on the spatial concept-oriented metaphor – and a non-cognitive linguistic approach on the Japanese EFL learners’ processing of request strategies with degrees of politeness. The cognitive linguistic approach consisted of applying the metaphor politeness is distance in the teaching of different degrees of politeness. It involved a spatial concept projection through which participants could understand degrees of politeness in terms of the spatially visualized concepts of near–far and high–low relationships associated with three social variables – closeness, power, and speaker difficulty – in either animated or static illustration. In contrast, the non-cognitive linguistic approach involved rote learning of target English polite requests in a list. The results demonstrated that the static version of the cognitive linguistic approach enabled participants to process degrees of politeness and perform as well as those who underwent the animated version. Moreover, the animation effects did not appear to have had a major impact on the overall performance of groups subjected to both cognitive language approaches. The results also showed that the cognitive linguistic approach groups outperformed the non-cognitive linguistic approach and control groups.

Gender and socioeconomic status: A pragmatic analysis of politeness strategies used by Iranian EFL students in Persian and English requests

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 Speech Act of Request and Refusal in English as a Foreign Language: Hotel Front Desk’s Linguistic Politeness

The subject matter discussed in this paper is how hotel front desk receptionists handle requests and refusals in their interactions with customers when they use English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The method of this research is descriptive with a qualitative approach, examining the interactions of front desk employees who work at Hotel Surya Duri, Indonesia. The sample consists of seven people who were given a discourse completion test which questioned them on how they deal with five different scenarios of customer requests and refusals. Results showed that employees perform independent research largely on how to deal with customer requests, but overall do not adequately master how to engage with foreign customer requests and refusals in EFL. This study suggests that concerned parties may benefit training current employees in foreign language communication training.

Politeness of Vietnamese Students in Writing Request Email in English: a Course-based and Socio-pragmatic Study

This exploratory study investigates politeness strategies employed by Vietnamese EFL learners when writing English request emails sent to foreign and Vietnamese professors and school staff. A corpus-based critical discourse analysis is used to analyze sub-elements of politeness including the degree of imposition, terms of address, request-giving strategy and lexicon-syntactic modifier. The results support the assumption that Vietnamese language pragmatic knowledge is deeply ingrained and has tremendous influence on students’ L2 email writing skills. The study also reveals that Vietnamese students applied a high level of imposition with formal term of address and salutation, directness strategies with the overuse of “please” and other hedges. While gender is not a determining factor, the inflexible adoption of fixed phrases and syntactic-lexical devices were attributed to the lack of sociopragmatic competence. Thus, apart from linguistic knowledge, the role of cultural awareness and socio-pragmatic knowledge should be highlighted in communicative English learning and teaching.