L2 English request strategies in Cyprus setting
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36505/ExLing-2021/12/0034/000507Keywords:
requests, (in)directness, perspective, internal modification, external modificationAbstract
This study investigated pragmatic competence and awareness of L2 learners of English. The focus was on their request strategies in L2 English, level of (in)directness, request perspective, internal and external modification, and the task effect. The participants of the study were 80 Cypriot Greek undergraduate students. The pragmatic tests, discourse completion task, multiple-choice questionnaire, and a role-play, were used in order to assess L2 learners’ pragmatic competence in oral discourse. The tasks had four conditions regarding power and social distance variables: [+social distance/status equals], [−social distance/status equals], [+social distance/hearer dominance], and [−social distance/hearer dominance]. Overall, it was found that social distance, hearer dominance, power, familiarity, and imposition affect the degree of (in)directness, request perspective, internal and external modification.
References
Economidou-Kogetsidis, M. (2008). Internal and external mitigation in interlanguage request production: The case of Greek learners of English. Journal of Politeness Research: Language, Behaviour, Culture, 4(1), 111-138.
Economidou-Kogetsidis, M. (2009). Interlanguage request modification: The use of lexical/phrasal downgraders and mitigating supportive moves. Multilingua, 28(1), 79-112.
Economidou-Kogetsidis, M. (2013). Strategies, modification and perspective in native speakers' requests: A comparison of WDCT and naturally occurring requests. Journal of Pragmatics, 53(1), 21-38.
Ogiermann, E., & Bella, S. (2020). An interlanguage study of request perspective: Evidence from German, Greek, Polish and Russian. Contrastive Pragmatics, 1-30.
Taguchi, N., & Roever, C. (2017). Second Language Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Terkourafi, M. (2015). Conventionalization: A new agenda for im/politeness research. Journal of Pragmatics, 86, 11-18.
Webman Shafran, R. (2019). Level of directness and the use of please in requests in English by native speakers of Arabic and Hebrew. Journal of Pragmatics, 148, 1-11.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
