The pragmatic transfer of requestive speech acts by Arab and Turkish EFL learners at the preparatory school

Cross-cultural pragmatic transfer is one potential cause of inappropriate performances in a second or foreign language. It occurs when nonnative learners converse in the language they are learning and transfer the conversational rules of their first language into the language they are studying. The present study is an endeavor to find out whether Arab and Turkish EFL learners convey their first language requesting strategies into English language. To this end, a Discourse Completion Task(DCT) and an oral interview task were adopted to verify pragmatic transfer from Arabic into English and from Turkish into English, if there was any. Three groups participated in this study, where the first two groups included Arab EFL learners living in Turkey and the third group included Turkish EFL learners. Leaners' language proficiency was measured using computer based and paper based tests to divide thirty Arab EFL learners into fifteen high proficient learners and fifteen low proficient. Three versions of written DCTs were used, an Arabic version, an English version, and a Turkish one. The Arabic version was distributed to the two groups of high and low proficiency Arab EFL students prior to distributing the English one and the Turkish version was distributed to the Turkish students prior to distributing the English one. Qualitative data gained from the Turkish and Arab EFL learners responses to the DCTs and the oral interview were graded according to a criterion and the results were quantified to analyze them descriptively by using the Turkish and Arab EFL learners responses as a baseline.