Politeness in Requests: Cross-cultural Study of Turkish and British Natives

Problem Statement: There are few researches investigating pragmatic awareness of Turkish adult EFL learners, and none of them have investigated factors such as social distance, power and degree of imposition that are important in affecting the learners' preference of request strategies. Therefore, study focusing on the request strategies of Turkish adult learners of English Will fill this gap. Purpose of Study: This study is cross-sectional investigation of the request strategies used by Turkish learners of English as Foreign Language and British native speakers of English. Therefore, the present study aims to shed light on Turkish EFL learners' request strategies in socially and psychologically distance situations. lt also attempts to systemize the various strategies used by Turkish learners for the purpose of analysing the learning requests from pragmatic point of view. Methods: Participants of the study are 35 Turkish language learners of English and 21 British natives. multiple- choice task questionnaire is used to collect data related to the request strategies used by both Turkish learners of English and the British natives. In order to identify the type and frequency of the request strategies made by learners, the data were analyzed and the frequency of occurrence and percentage of each category of strategies were calculated for each group and each situation. Findings and Results: The prime finding of the study reveals that Turkish learners do not differ from British natives in terms of their strategy preference of requests. Both groups seem to have tendency toward conventional,direct-request strategies. The results also reveal that Turkish learners are more direct than the English natives. Conclusions and Recommendations: Suggestions for further research and some recommendations concerning how to develop language learners' pragmatic awareness are provided.

PDF

___

Aijmer, K. (1996). Conversational routines in English: Convention and creativity. London and New York: Longman.
Aydın, C. H. Mclsaak, M. S. (2004). Impact of instructional technology in Turkey. Educational Technology Research and Development, 52(1), 105-112.
Bachman, L. F. (1990). Fundamental considerations in language testing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bialystok, E. (1993). Symbolic representation and attentional control in pragmatic competence. In G. Kasper S. Blum-Kulka (Eds.), Interlanguage pragmatics (pp. 43-59). New York: Oxford University Press.
Blum-Kulka, House, ]. Kasper, G. (1989). Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, N.]: Ablex Publishing.
Bou-Franch, P. Garces- Conejos, P. (2003). Teaching linguistic politeness: methodological proposal. IRAL, 42, 1-22.
Brown, P. Levinson, B. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. London Cambridge University Press.
Canale, M., Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics, 1(1), 1-47.
Dikilitas, K. (2004). Comparative study into acquisition of politeness in English as foreign language. Unpublished MA thesis, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Çanakkale.
Ellis, R. (1992). Learning to communicate: study of two language learners' requests. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 14, 1-23.
Ellis, R. (1994). The stuy of second language acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Eslamirasekh, Z. (1993). cross-cultural comparison of requestive speech act realization patterns in Persian and American English. Pragmatic and Language Learning, 4, 85-103.
Fukushima, S. (1996). Request strategies in British and Japanese. Language Science, 18(34), 671-688. Hall, E.T. (1976). Beyond culture. NewYork: Doubleday.
Harlow, L. L. (1990). Do they mean what they say? Sociopragmatic competence and second language learners. The Modern Language ]ournal, 74(3), 328—349.
Hofstede, G. (2001). Cultural consequences: comparing values, behaviours, institutions, and organizations across nations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Puplications.
Holtgraves, T. (1997).Styles of language use: Individual and cultural variability in conversational indirectiveness. Iournal of Personality and Social Psycologyy, 73(3), 624-637.
House, ]., Kasper, G. (1987). lnterlanguage pragmatics: Requesting in foreign language. In W. Loerscher Schulze (Eds.), Perspective on language in performance (pp. 1250-1288). Tuebingen: Narr.
Huls, E. (1989). Directness, explicitness and orientation in Turkish family interaction. In Deprez, K. (Eds.),Language and intergroup relations in Flanders and in the Netherlands (pp.145—164). Foris: Dordrecht.
]alilifar, A. (2009). Request strategies: Cross-sectional study of Iranian EFL learners and Australian native speakers. English Language Teaching, 22(2), 46-61.
Karatepe, Ç. (2001). Pragmatic awareness in EFL teaching training. Language Awareness, 10(2), 178—188.
Kasper, G. (1989). Variation in lnterlanguage: Speech Act Realization. In Susan Gass, Caroyn Madden Dennis Preston and Larry Selinker (Eds.), Variation in second language acquisition: Discourse and pragmatics (pp.37—58). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Kasper, G. 8: Schimitt, R. (1996).Developmental issues in interlanguage pragmatics. Studies in Language Acquisition, 18 (2), 149-165.
Koike, D.A. (1989). Pragmatic competence and adult L2 acquisition: Speech acts in interlanguage. The Modern Language journal, 73 (3), 279-286.
Leech, G. (1983). The principle of pragmatics. New York: Longman.
Liu, C. (2007). Pragmatics in foreign language instruction: the efl‘ects of pedagogical intervention and technology on the development of EFL learners' realization of request. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Texas 8: ALM University, Texas.
Otçu, B. 8: Zeyrek, D. (2008). Development of requests: study on Turkish learners of English. In Martin Putz and ]oAnne Neff-van Aertselaer (Eds), Interlanguage and Cross-Cultural Perspectives (pp.265—298). Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Rose, K. R. (1994). On the validity of DCTs in non -Western contexts. Applied Linguistics, 15, 1-14.
Rose, K. R. (2000). An exploratory cross-sectional study of interlanguage pragmatic development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22, 27-67.
Rose, K. 8: Ono, R. (1995). Eliciting speech act data in ]apanese: The effect of questionnaire type. Language Learning, 54(2), 191-223.
Sasaki, Rintell, E., Mitchell, C. ]. (1989). Studying requests and apologies: An inquiry into method. In S. Blum-Kulka, ]. House, G. Kasper (Eds.), Cross— cultural pragmatics (pp.248-272). Norwood, N]: Ablex.
Searle, ]. (1969). Speech acts: An assay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sifianou, M. (1992). Politeness phenomena in England and Greece: cross—cultural cerspectiv., Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Suh, ]. (1999). Pragmatic perception of politeness in requests by Korean learners of English as second language. IRAL, 37(3), 195-213.
Tanaka, S., Kawade, S. (1982). Politeness strategies and second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 5, 18-33.
Thomas, ]. (1983). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics, 4(2), 91-112.
Yamashita, S. O. (1996). Six measures of ISL pragmatics. Second Language Teaching 8: Curriculum Center. University of Hawaii at Manoa: USA