This paper analyzes interlanguage requests of different degrees of imposition produced by Hungarian advanced EFL students in elicited vs. spontaneously written emails to their teacher. Eighty-one requests written by 46 students were collected to constitute the natural email data. The other dataset comprised 78 requests elicited from the email writers through an email-like written discourse completion test (WDCT). Requests in the spontaneously produced emails and the elicited texts were analyzed in term of length, level of directness, internal modification, supportive moves, and request perspectives. Descriptive statistics, t-test, and Chi-square test were performed on both datasets to investigate the differences. Although WDCT is considered the most commonly used data collection instrument in interlanguage pragmatics due to its numerous advantages, its validity and reliability have often been questioned when compared to naturalistic data. The present study, besides shedding light on...

Inter-language pragmatics, which is concerned with how nonnative speakers use and perform L2, has gained more attention among pragmatic researchers in recent years. Request acts are an important event in our daily life; asking someone to do something for you provides an opportunity to enhance social relationships. However, performing requests can differ from one culture to another; each culture naturally involves different views of what is considered a polite request. Based on this hypothesis, making a request can reflect the socio-cultural values of a certain community. Accordingly, this study investigates the pragmatic competence of Turkish and Iraqi undergraduate students and examines what cultural variables could affect the production and perception of requests in English as being performed by two culturally different learners of English namely the Iraqi and Turkish EFL learners. In order to carry out this research, the researcher applied the coding scheme for the questionnaire developed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1984) which addressed undergraduate students of Iraqi and Turkish universities. The results show, both quantitatively and qualitatively, that the Iraqi and Turkish EFL learners showed a high pragmatic competence; also, more similarities than differences have been found between Iraqi and Turkish students request acts due to some factors including religion and the geographical location of Turkey and Iraq.

Over the last three decades, the literature on L2 pragmatics has presented many studies on both pragmatic competence and how to improve pragmatic competence in EFL contexts (Taguchi 2011 and 2015). Taguchi (2015) described pragmatic competence as follows: “Pragmat-ic competence refers to one’s knowledge of linguistics, norms and social conventions, and one’s ability to use these knowledge bases in a socially-bound interaction.” (p.1).

This study was a cross-sectional investigation into the request strategies used by Iranian learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) and Australian native speakers of English. The sample involved 96 B.A. and M.A. Iranian EFL learners and 10 native speakers of English. A Discourse Completion Test (DCT) was used to generate data related to the request strategies used by each group. The selection of request situations in the DCT was based on 2 social factors of relative power and social distance. Although the results revealed pragmatic development, particularly in the movement from direct to conventionally indirect strategies on the part of the EFL learners, the EFL learners with higher proficiency displayed overuse of indirect type of requesting, whereas the native group was characterized by the more balanced use of this strategy. The lower proficiency EFL learners, on the other hand, overused the most direct strategy type. In terms of the influence of the social variables, the findings of this research revealed that as far as social power is concerned, the EFL learners displayed closer performance to the native speakers. But considering social distance, it seems that the Iranian EFL learners had not acquired sufficient sociopragmatic knowledge to display proper social behavior.

In terms of their directness and modification strategies, this study investigated how undergraduate speakers of Turkish formulate their naturally occurring requests in an academic context, in which they request things from an academic in his office. After a 4-year data collection period, the researcher analyzed 395 of the requests (hand-recorded as immediate field notes) made to him. The findings on levels of directness revealed that the strongest tendency is towards conventionally indirect strategies, while the female tendency towards them is even clearer. The dominance of conventional indirectness is in parallel also with the degree of imposition of the requests. 'Zero marking' is what dominates the findings on internal modification strategies, while some preferences, such as unfinished sentences, could suggest language or context-specific results. In light of these descriptive findings on a part of everyday language in academia, the study could in practical terms help learners and teachers of Turkish and Turkish learners/teachers of English or any other language as well. Moreover, it could contribute to the efforts towards handling the methodological concerns in pragmatics research about the extent to which elicited data can represent what people actually say in natural conversation.

Differences in nonnative speakers' pragmatic performance may lead to serious communication problems. Although previous research has investigated different types of request strategies employed by English as a foreign or second language (EFL/ESL) learners, little is known whether they use different or similar types of request strategies in the faculty context. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate cross-cultural variation in the use of request strategies by EFL/ESL learners to their faculty. To this aim, the request strategies elicited from 38 intermediate Iranian EFL learners in Iran, 24 intermediate ESL learners in England, and 16 British native English-speaking teachers were examined. A discourse completion test (DCT) was used to elicit the EFL/ESL learners' request strategies to the faculty. Frequency findings suggested preference for the use of conventionally indirect request strategies to their faculty by the participants. Moreover, chi-square results indicated that their first language (L1) had no effect on the choice of request strategies employed by such learners to their faculty. Conclusions are that EFL/ESL learners generally use more negative politeness strategies to mitigate their requests to their faculty.