An Investigation into Iranian High School Students’ Use of Request Speech Act

Abstract

The recent advances in technology and increased opportunity for second language (L2) learners to communicate with native speakers make learning pragmatic competence and principles of appropriate language use indispensable to successful language acquisition. In view of the aforesaid fact, the present study set out to explore the most frequent strategy used by Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners regarding the speech act of request and examine the effectiveness of the Iranian mainstream high school textbooks in developing pragmatic competence and language appropriacy. The target population of the study comprised a total of 142 male and female high school students. To tap the data relevant to the learners' pragmatic competence, a Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT) was devised for the speech act of request. It's worth noting that while the original version of WDCT was in English, it was translated into Persian in order to come up with more illustrative and dependable results. The validity of the both versions were checked before their administrations. The findings of the study revealed that though the females proved to be better users of indirect strategies than males, the majority of individuals had problem making appropriate requests in terms of the social status and power of the interlocutors

The Interplay of Contextual Variables and Language Proficiency in Request Realization

“…Hence, it can be concluded that, in this study, Iranians as foreign language learners of English were sociopragmatically aware of the norm of the target language regarding the level of directness in requests. Previous studies conducted on Iranian EFL learners also confirm participants’ pragmatic competence in choosing the level of directness (Hashemian, 2014; Hashemian & Farhang-Ju, 2017; Jalilifar, 2009; Panahzadeh & Asadi, 2019); this is particularly of importance because Iranians as native speakers of Persian use direct strategies the most (Hashemian, 2014; Kalantari Khandani, 2017), while at the same time accompanying direct requests with several internal and external modifiers (Kalantari Khandani, 2017). Contrary to this study, however, Bu (2012) and Jalilifar (2009) reported pragmatic development with the increase in proficiency; the use of conventionally indirect requests grew with proficiency.…”

“…While studies conducted on request speech act extensively investigated request realization for directness and politeness (Esfahlan & Boroumand, 2020; Ghasempour & Farnia, 2016; Lenchuk & Ahmed, 2019; Panahzadeh & Asadi, 2019) and internal and external modifications (Abdolrezapour, 2015; Abdolrezapour & Eslami-Rasekh, 2012; Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2009; Göy et al, 2012), this study aims to also examine request perspective, which as stated by Ogiermann and Bella (2020) is the least studied mitigation form in request speech act studies and thus very few studies examined this aspect (e.g., Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2013).…”

English Preparatory School Learners’ Pragmatic Motivation in a StudyAbroad Setting

“…Research recognizes that language usage can change based on the context, the relationship between speakers, and the setting of the communication (Demirkol, 2015), and students need to learn how to adapt their language to different situations, such as formal versus informal conversations or written versus spoken communication (Huwel & Ghayadh, 2020; Kecskes, 2015), this can be challenging as well. Some studies contend that language often contains ambiguity and indirectness, where the intended meaning is not explicitly stated, and teaching students to recognize and interpret these indirect cues, such as sarcasm, irony, or euphemisms, can be challenging (Panahzadeh & Asadi, 2019). Equally, pragmatic competence also involves understanding nonverbal cues like facial expressions, gestures, and body language, and teaching students to interpret and use these cues appropriately is crucial for effective communication, which may be demanding in many teaching settings (Zhang & Papi, 2021).…”

“…Incorporating pragmatic instruction into language curricula requires specialized teaching methods and materials that some teachers may not possess (Zhang & Papi, 2021). However, motivated students will be ready to learn, provided the instruction is tailored to their needs (Panahzadeh & Asadi, 2019). To overcome these challenges, educators may use different exercises, real-life scenarios, video examples, and cross-cultural discussions to motivate and provide students with practical experience using language effectively in various social contexts.…”

“…Research shows that speech acts aid language cognitive processes (Li et al, 2022; M. F. Lin et al, 2022; Panahzadeh & Asadi, 2019; Sharqawi & Anthony, 2020). A similar study noted that speech acts are the basis for effective interaction (House & Kádár, 2023).…”