An examination of 5th grade students' productions regarding the speech act of request

This research was conducted to examine how fifth-grade middle school students perform the speech act of requesting. The main objective of the study is to determine which strategies students use when making requests in different contexts and to what extent they realize the elements that constitute the request speech act. The study was designed within the framework of the survey model, one of the quantitative research methods. A Discourse Completion Test consisting of nine different contexts was used as the data collection tool. These contexts were designed to reflect differences in social status, communication channels, and situational variety. The implementation was carried out in the second term of the 2023–2024 academic year, and data were collected from a total of 90 fifth-grade students in three different schools. The responses were analyzed based on the request strategies model developed by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984), and Polat's (2010) speech act assessment tool. Students' expressions were evaluated in terms of both the request strategies (direct level, conventionally indirect level, nonconventional indirect level) and the elements that constitute a request (address term, politeness markers, grounders, preparatory elements). As a result, it was observed that students adopted different strategies depending on the context. However, in formal settings and written communication (e.g., phone or email), they tended to use polite requests inadequately. These findings indicate a need to further develop pragmatic competence at the middle school level.