Development of pragmatic competence in teaching Turkish as a foreign language: USE of request speech act

Foreign language teaching is carried out implementing communicative methods within the framework of language- culture relationship with the programs, materials and teaching activities designed to develop four skills holistically and communicative competence development is prioritzed. Teaching Turkish as a foreign language (YADOT) is carried out with an increasing demand and need in our country and abroad, and teaching activities should be degigned in line with the same objectives, programs focusing on the development of communicative competence should be designed. From this point of view, the purpose of this thesis is to determine whether learners of Turkish are able to perform speech acts, which constitute a large part of daily communication, in different contexts, and the strategies they prefer to use. The study has a qualitative research design conducted in a case study model. The research was carried out with a sample group of 33 YADOT speakers at B1 level studying Istanbul University Language Center. The data of the research were obtained conducting discourse completion test consisting 12 different contexts. In order to analyze the data solving the problem and sub-problems Blum-Kulka and Olshtain's request strategies classification was used. The results revealed that the B1 level YADOT speakers can perform request speech act. It has been observed that, in general, conventionally indirect level, reference to preparatory conditions strategy has been preferred while direct level. In addition it is noteworthy that the participants do not use the nonconventional indirect level strategies. It has been noted that B1 level YADOT speakers were able to choose appropriate address terms, grounders and syntactic downgraders as adjuncts but they didn't apply any upgraders.