The Use of Request Strategies in English by Iranian Graduate Students: A Case Study

ABSTRACT: This study aimed at investigating Iranian graduate students’ use of requestive head act strategies in terms of two factors of degree of familiarity and social power. The focus was to determine any signs of pragmatic transfer from the first language to the second language and studying the pragmatic competency of Iranian graduate students regarding this specific speech act. To meet this aim 100 graduate students studying at the Eastern Mediterranean University were administered a Discourse Completion test (DCT) which was adapted from Dong (2009) with 14 situations regarding requesting head act strategies. The first 7 of the DCTs examined the degree of familiarity and the second half focused on social power. To interpret the data, two baseline groups of British native speakers of English (BNS) and Farsi native speakers (FNS) were also provided with the adapted versions of the same DCT. The collected data was coded according to Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984). Coded data was later analyzed across the three groups of participants by the use of SPSS program to determine the related frequencies. The interpretation of the results revealed possible signs of transfer from the first language (L1) to the second language (L2) regarding some specific situations presented in the DCT. Evidence on the development of interlanguage by Iranian graduate students was also detected. Regarding the two factors of social power and degree of familiarity, Iranian learners were found to need more education on the choice of strategies used as they performed similar strategies used by the FNS rather than the BNS. Regarding the choice of strategies, preparatory strategy, in this study, was the most frequent strategy used by Iranian graduate students. Keywords: Requests, Pragmatics, Pragmatic competence, Speech acts. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………