Requesting in English: Interlanguage pragmatics of Turkish children

The purpose of the study was to examine the interlanguage request strategies of 8th grade Turkish EFL learners in private primary school settings. The participants of the study were in two main groups: 550 8th grade students attending 10 different private primary schools and 20 English native speaker primary school children. The data were collected by means of a Multiple Choice Discourse Completion Test (MCDCT) and a Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) adapted from the Cartoon Oral Production Task (COPT) by Rose (2000). The data gathered from MCDCTs were analysed using SPSS 13 version and the data from WDCTs were analysed based on the ?Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realisation Project? (CCSARP) coding scheme (Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper, 1989). Two methods were employed in quantifying the data: frequency analysis and chi-square. Furthermore, non-native speakers? written data were also coded according to Eisenstein and Bodman?s (1986) rating scale so that types of pragmalinguistic failure were determined.The results revealed a marked preference for conventional indirectness by 8th grade Turkish EFL learners in 12 situations at three levels: Requester with more power than requestee (+ P), requester and requestee with equal power (= P), requester with less power than requestee (- P). Conventionally indirect strategies were followed by direct strategies and non-conventionally indirect strategies were used only very rarely. Like Turkish EFL learners, Turkish and English native speaker children relied on conventionally indirect strategies in the request utterances in their native language. However, Turkish native speaker children used direct strategies more than the ones they used in the L2 and English native speaker children. ?Query Preparatory? was found to be the most common request strategy type and ?Grounders? were the most common external modification category. In terms of the interlocutor?s status and age and preference of request strategies, there was little evidence of sensitivity to the situational variation. Data collection instrument and experience in an English speaking country were also found to affect pragmatic comprehension and production of Turkish EFL learners.Key words: requests, request strategies, interlanguage pragmatics