A Case Study of Requests in English Emails of Iraqi Arab University Students in North Cyprus

The present study aimed to identify the pragmatics of politeness with reference to the head act of email request strategies used by the Iraqi postgraduate students in an academic setting at Eastern Mediterranean University, Near East University, Cyprus International University and Girne American University in theTurkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). Two research questions were asked. The first aimed to investigate the strategies preferred by Iraqi post-graduate students while performing requests in e-mails, whereas the second aimed to find out the role of learners’ native language transfer in performing requests. The research was conducted as a qualitative and a quantitive case study.Discourse Completion Test (DCT) was used to collect data from three different groups; namely, Iraqi postgraduate students (IPGSs) as the research group, and British-English native speakers (BENSs) and Iraqi-Arab native speakers (IANSs), both representing the baseline groups.This completion task mainly focused on student-professor email request communication. The findings of the study showed that both IPGS and BENS groups preferred to use the conventionally indirect strategies to request in emails. The results pointed out that the IPGS performedrequestsin using formulations different from the baseline group BENS. This indicated that they didn't do same as the target or native pragmatic norms all the time, but they were engaged in the creative construction process in interlanguage pragmatic development . In light of the result, such study involves pedagogical implications that point of the need of Iraqi English teachers to improve their students’ level of pragmatic competence in order to avoid pragmatic failure in email communication, especially in request strategy. Finally, the present study grants other useful areas for more investigation by focusing on the natural data of request strategy performed by EFL learners that may cause pragmatic transfer. Keywords:Pragmatic variations, Pragmatic transfer,Linguistic politeness strategy, Interlanguage pragmatics.