A comparative study on the performance of requests and apologies by Turkish and american teenagers: A pragmatic competence point of view

Speech acts are considered to be one of the main components of pragmatic competence. Requests and apologies are two of the basic speech acts to be acquired by language learners, because they both have face-threatening features (Brown and Levinson, 1987), and failure in the production of them might result in miscommunication in the target language. In this respect, the main aim of this study is to identify and compare the request and apology productions of American and Turkish teenager speakers of English. The data of this study was collected from 20 American and 20 Turkish 14-15 year-old speakers of English by using Written Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs). It was analyzed based on Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project Coding Manual and by using descriptive statistics. As a result of the comparison of the native and nonnative speech act productions it was found that even though both groups use most of the speech act strategies proposed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) in the Cross-cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) Coding Manual, the distribution of these strategies differ across the two groups. Next, in order to compare the request and apology productions of the American and Turkish participants in terms of appropriateness, the speech act productions of the participants were graded by two native raters based on a ten-point rating scale. Statistical analysis (SPSS) tests were conducted to compare the grades given by the two raters to the productions of the native and nonnative participants. As a result of this comparison, Turkish participants were found to use as appropriate apologies as Americans. However, the request productions of the Turkish participants were found less appropriate than the request productions of the American participants.Keywords: Pragmatic competence, speech acts, requests, apologies