An evaluation of the pragmatic competence of pre-service English language teachers: Politeness strategies used in making requests in the academic context

The current study aimed to examine, from an interlanguage pragmatics perspective, how Turkish pre-service EFL teachers fulfill the speech act of request in terms of politeness strategies, levels of directness, internal and external modifiers, perspectives, and address terms in the academic context. To collect data, a discourse completion test (DCT), including ten scenarios, was developed, and 89 pre-service EFL teachers studying in a private university in Turkey were asked to write what they would say in response to the situations described in the DCT. The data-the request tokens- were first analyzed qualitatively using an adapted model of the CCSARP framework developed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). Then, the results of the request strategies were quantized, and the data were analyzed through descriptive statistics and chi-square. The study's findings demonstrated that the tendency to use conventionally indirect request strategies was high in situations where the degrees of impositions were both high and low in academic contexts. This indicated that the choice of request strategies was parallel for both degrees of imposition. Additionally, it was found that the use of external modifiers was high, mostly occurring as 'grounders' to mitigate the requests. As for internal modifiers, pre-service EFL teachers preferred 'please' as politeness markers to soften the force of the requests on the hearers. Moreover, the tendency to address instructors remained low, highlighting the need for being more formal and polite when making requests in the academic context. Hence, it was observed that the participants mostly made speaker and hearer-oriented requests in the academic context; however, speaker- oriented requests were made more. This suggested that the participants mostly tended to impose benefits on the hearers, where social power and distance are high among the interlocutors. The study's findings indicated that pre-service EFL teachers perform the speech act of request politely to some extent; nevertheless, they need to gain pragmatic competence to make authentic ways of making requests by integrating appropriate mitigating strategies in the academic context. In conclusion, integrating the pragmatic aspects of language into English Language Teaching programs is significant to improve the pragmatic awareness and competence of prospective language teachers regarding the fulfillment of requests in academic contexts in particular and other speech acts in various contexts of conversations in general. Keywords: Pragmatics, Interlanguage Pragmatics, Pragmatic Competence, Requests, Politeness