A Cross-Cultural Study of Pragmatically Requestive Speech Act Realization Patterns

Table of Contents

Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background of the Study
1.2 Research rationale
1.3 Purpose of the Study
1.4 Research Questions

Chapter Two Literature Review
2. Literature Review
2.1 Communicative competence
2.1.1 Interactional competence
2.1.2 Pragmatic competence
2.2 Cross-Cultural pragmatics
2.3 Interlanguage pragmatics
2.4 Speech Act theory & Politeness Theory
2.4.1 Request strategies
2.5 International and local Cultural Studies

Chapter Three Study
3. The study
3.1 Subjects
3.1.1. Settings & Linguistic landscape of Dubai, UAE & Ismailia, Egypt
3.2 Instruments
3.3 Data collection procedure
3.4 Data Analysis procedures
3.5 Ethical Considerations

Chapter Four The Results
4. The Results
4.1 Research Question
4.2 Research Question

Chapter Five Discussion
5. Discussion
5.1. Pedagogical Implications
5.2. Limitations of the Study

Chapter Six Conclusion
6. Conclusion & Areas for Further Research

References

Appendices

Appendix A (Discourse Completion Tests)

Appendix B (Consent Form)

Abstract

Since there have been few pragmatic studies, especially at the local level, that have dealt with the adolescents, and since the language and culture are inseperable, this study examines pragamtically requestive speech acts realizations patterns between English native and non-native adolescents in Dubai, UAE and Ismailia, Egypt. It looks at how the speech acts’ requesting strategies differ across different cultures in terms of the social distance, size of imposition and power. It also looks at the types of politeness strategies, which could increase or decrease the degree of the imposion on the hearer(s), employed by the two groups in terms of the aforementioned sociolinguistic variables.

The subjects of this study were divided into two groups. the first group consists of

30 English native adolescents from UK, US and Canada while the second group consists of

30 English non-native adolescents from Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Iran, Malaysia, India, Germany and Philippines.

The study have utilized the Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs) distributed to the voluntary students. It revealed significant differences between the two groups in employing the request’s strategies. Additionally, it revealed significant differences between them in employing the politeness strategies.

This study provides implications to the students, teachers, educational syllabus

designers, decision makers, authors for preventing pragmatic failure/ error to happen and for facilitating effective communications across cultures, too.

Key words: Requesting strategies - politeness strategies- pragmatic failure- effective communications - social context.

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Dedication

This work is dedicated to my parents for their unconditional love and encouragement, my wife who greatly supported me to help me complete this dissertation, and my children Azza and Omar for encouraging me intangibly. All of them were very patient with me in times of pressure. Additionally, they gave my study the priority over their social life. They supported me tangibly and intangibly to complete this work. I would like to express my thankfulness, gratitude and love for their great contribution to my success after a long and interesting journey of study.

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to my professor and supervisor, Dr. Yasemin Yildiz, for her veteran & noble guidance, great support, and precious feedback throughout the whole process of writing my dissertation. I really would like to gratitude for her as she granted me precious knowledge and support.

Additionally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude for all my professors, not to be limited, Dr. Amanda Howard, Dr. Clifton Chadwick, Dr. Naz Awan, and Dr. Sufian Forawi, who taught me how to think critically with different perspectives. Thus, I express my thankfulness and appreciation to Academic success unit staff especially Ms. Mary Mayall who proofread parts of my dissertation and provided valuable academic guidelines.

Finally yet importantly, I am really grateful to, Professor Abdullah

Alshamsi, who paved my way to go on successfully. Without his support, I could not complete this dissertation. Finally, I would like to thank the faculty Dean, Professor. Eman Gaad, for her wise approach in simply pushing me to complete this work.

List of Tables

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List of Figures

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Chapter One Introduction

1.1. Background of the Study

In different societies, people speak different langauges and have different dialects. Thus, they utilize them in radical and different manners due to the cultural differences. In some cultures, normal regarding disagreements include loud voices, and emotions expressed remarkably loudly, while in other cultures, people seriously avoid disagreements and anger. Alternatevely, they speak softly and control their inner revolutions. For instance, although in some cultures it is very bad to talk while another person is talking, it is, in some other cultures, a normal behaviour ( Cliff & Wierzbicka 1997). Such differences may cause confusion for langauge learners.

Moreimportantly, language learners meet two major obstacles while acquiring the second language, which are the need to acquire the linguistic system of the target language and the need to acknowlege the appropriate language use (Li 2008). The literature shows that some linguists, for example, Chomsky, only tackled the first obstacle without reference to the social context. Chomsky (1965) endeavored to help the English learners by claiming that if the learner knows syntax, phonology and lexis, he/she will unconciously be a competent speaker of the language. However, the literature shows that his concept has been critisized.

Hymes (1967 & 1972) is one of those who critisized Chomsky’s point of view and broadened the term “competent speaker ” in his communicative competence approach incorporating the ability to use the target language appropriately in different contexts. He also recommended studying communicative competence through speech events in different cultures. His framework is under the umbrella of the ethnography of communication and is known by the acronym “SPEAKING framework ”.

Consequently, the social-linguist moved from the isolated language form into the actual use in a specific social context. Thus, the term communicative competence was set by Hymes to include linguistic competence as well as pragmatic competence. The lack of either competence might cause the conversation to break down or cause pragmatic error/failure between speakers who come from different cultures (Jie 2010).

Speech acts are one of the most invistigated pragmatic elements in cross-cultural and/or interlanguage pragmatics fields. There have been many studies conducted to compare the speech act realizations and productions across cultures, including Cross- Cultural Speech Acts Realization Patterns (CCSARP) by Blum-Kulka et al. 1989.

In this study, speech acts requests will be focused on. It will primarly focus on the comparison between the requesting strategies utilized by English non-native and native speakers. This comparison is grounded in Blum-Kulka et al’s. (1989) taxonomy which includes direct, conventionally indirect, and non-conventionally indirect strategies. Another point that will be focused in this study is a comparison between the types of politeness strategies employed by each group to soften the imposition on the hearer and avoid pragmatic error/failure between them. This comparison is grounded Brown and Levinson’s (1987) taxonomy. In sum, these comparisons are based on data collected from native and non-native speakers of English utilizing Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs). These DCTs include different situations that require request’s productions in terms of three controlled sociolinguistic variables (Power, Social distance and Size of imposition). The subjects are English native and non-native adolescents who were around 15 years old. It should be mentioned that this study have been conducted in two different settings which are in Dubai, UAE and Ismailia, Egypt. The data will be quantitavely and qualititavely analyzed following the Coding Manual created by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). It is possible that the results of this study will help English teachers, learners, educational policy makers, materials designers, and researchers to develop second language acquisition of English learners.

1.2. Research rationale

This study has been conducted for many reasons. First, although there were some studies conducted in the fields of Cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics, they rarely dealt with adolecents learners, especially at the local context. Most of the studies have been carried out on adults although it would be more beneficial if these studies were carried out with adolescents becuase it would be more useful to develop their pragmatic awarenss in earlier stages. This will help them when they are becoming adults, avoiding pragmatic errors/failures and aiding them to communicat more effectively and efficiently .

As language and culture are inseperable and correlated to each other, second language acquisition is also a second culture acquisition (Spackman 2009), and as both linguistic features and social context are simultaneously important to a second language acquesition, ignoring the social context will lead to rejection of the pedagogy and educational materials by the L2 learner. Thus, Jie (2010) mentiones that there might be pragmatic failure as a result of the lack of either linguistic competence and social-linguistic competence).

The researcher collected the data from Dubai and Ismailia because both destinations are easily reachable by the researcher. Additionally, the bumber of the subjects from Ismailia, Egypt complet the number of subjects of Dubai, UAE. Further, the UAE’s residents use English as a Lingua franca while the Egypt’s residents use English as a foreign language, so all the subjects will typify Kachru’s three concentric circles.

Hence, it can be seen that comparing the speech acts requesting productions across different cultural adolescents is important and useful from many perspectives. As this is an important topic, this study attemps to fill the gap for the adolescent learners of English at the local level and to contribute to pragmatically developing English learners across cultures.

1.3 Purpose of the Study

The primary purpose of this research is to identify and compare pragmatically requestive speech acts strategies and politeness strategies employed by English native adolescents (7 Canadians, 15 Americans and 8 British) enrolled in 9th grade in international schools in Dubai, UAE, and English non-native adolescents (3 Pakistanis, 4 Emaratis, 10 Epyptians, 3 Iranians, 3 Malaysians, 3 Indians, 2 Germans and 2 Philippinos) enrolled in 9th grade in international schools in Dubai,UAE & Ismailia,Egypt. It is at the interface between interlanguage pragmatics and cross-cultural pragmatics at the same time. Meanwhile, this study aims at achieving the following:

Depicting the ethnography of communications theory which contains communicative competence, its components, and consequences with a highlight on interactional competence.

Assessing and comparing the perceptions of appropriacy for pragmatic functions of requests between the native and non-native speakers. Depicting and defining Pragmatic competence, speech act, speech event and Politeness theory for improving the pedagogy of pragmatics in EFL/ESL settings and to eliminate the intuition principle that teachers use in the cross-cultural classrooms by providing pedagogical implications to teachers, students, authors and decision makers.

1.4 Research Questions

Based on the aforementioned rationale, this study will address the following questions.

1) How do the requesting strategies for the native and non-native speakers of English differ in accordance with:

a) Social distance (SD)
b) Size of imposition (I)
c) Power (P)

2) What types of politeness strategies (markers) do native and non-native speakers utilize to soften the effects of face threatening acts? In accordance with:

a) Social distance (SD)
b) Size of imposition (I)
c) Power (P)

As a result of this subject’s importance and its great effect on second language learning development, this study analyzes written discourse of English native and non- native ninth grade adolescents. Thus, it will systematically examine the effect of any discursive differences between the aforementioned groups on second language acquisition.

In the forthcoming sections, the literature review of communicative competence and its consequences and the data analysis of requesting strategies and politeness strategies between the two groups will be qualitatively and quantitatively presented. Then, finally, pedagogical implications will be depicted.

Chapter Two Literature Review

2. Literature Review

This chapter depicts crucial theoretical concepts which typify the basis of this study: communicative competence, interactional competence, pragmatic competence, interlanguage pragmatics, cross-cultural pragmatics, speech act politeness theories, and request strategies. It will also shed the light on the international and local cultural studies.

2.1 Communicative competence

Until few decades, the researchers only focused to the linguistic aspects of the language. This was defined by Chomsky who theorized linguistic competence. He mentions that only learning the given grammar will help the learners to be a competent speaker-listener (Chomsky 1965). On the other hand, Hymes (1967, 1972) has developed the notion of communicative competence, which has been mentioned in Austin (1962) and Searle (1969), and criticized Chomskian concept due to its ignorance to the social factors of the language.

Hymes (1972, P. 282) generally defines communicative competence as including “both linguistic and cultural aspects”. He also argues that “[c]ompetence is dependent upon both (tacit) knowledge and (ability for) use”. In fact, Hymes concerned with the integration of linguistic theory as well as the general theory of communication and culture. The homogeneous member behaves and interprets others’ behaviors based on the knowledge of communicative systems which have been available to them. Hymes (1972) also sets four questions (parameters) to the systems of rules suited under the communicative behavior. “1. Whether (and to what degree) something is formally possible. 2. Whether (and to what degree) something is feasible). 3. Whether (and to what degree) something is appropriate.

4. Whether (and to what degree) something is done”. Knowledge of each of these parameters is a part of communicative competence. This knowledge contains the non- cognitive factors, not limited to, attitude and motivation, and interactional competence, such as, courage, composure and sportsmanship. As the persons are different in their knowledge as well as their ability to use this knowledge, and as the nature of the event itself varies, the performance of a person varies from one situation to another as well (Savignon 1997).

Several definitions have been recently provided to define communicative competence, Li (2008, p. 5) defines it as “the ability to interact successfully in social interaction, and is a central focus in second language acquisition”. Further, Yule (2010, p. 194) defines it as “the general ability to use language accurately, appropriately, and flexibly”. Yule (2010) adds that it has three components: grammatical competence, socio- linguistic competence, strategic competence and communication strategy. First, grammatical competence refers to the accurate use of syntax and lexis. Second, the socio- linguistic component refers to the ability to use an appropriate utterance. It provides the learner the knowledge of when to say” Can I have some water?” and when to say “Give me some water?” based on the social context. Third, the strategic component refers to the ability to go through the difficulties of the L2. For example, if the L2 learners have difficulty in expressing something they know in their first language, they should use the strategic component of the communicative competence through using some other words expressing the meaning for not breaking down the interaction.

Halliday (1970) adds another dimension to the communicative competence which is the functions of language by noting that language has developed in the service of social functions. He is concerned with completely moving from the structural dominations that have been deposited by linguistics into a combination of structural and functional approaches in language study. In other words, Halliday (1970) is concerned with the context of a situation which enables us to understand the functions of specific utterances. He also set three basic functions which match generic needs met by the language. First, the language serves for the content which refers to the utterance’s experience of the real world and the way he/she sees the world. Second, the language serves to form social relations between the person and others. Finally, the language makes connections between itself and features of a specific situation.

Canale and Swain (1980) state that Hymes’s and Halliday’s sociolinguistic work is crucial for the development of a communicative approach as they are concerned with the interaction of social context, form and the forms, particularly, the social meaning. Additionally, Savignon (1997) concludes that as demonstrated by Hymes and Halliday, we have to concentrate on what is said in a specific social context forming a meaning rather than the possible linguistic form of what is said.

From that time, much theorizing has happened about the social nature of language which has helped the heterogeneous groups using the language to manage and structure their daily experiences (Duranti 1997). Moreover, the social-linguist transformed from a focus on the forms into a focus on the form (Jie 2010).

The concept of communicative competence has been applied to SLA by many recognized researchers. Paulston (1974) emphasizes that Hymes’s communicative competence refers to the social rules of language use more than accepting it as a linguistic interaction in the L2. In her point of view, she argues that although some of the communicative activities in the language classrooms are useful for the learners in practicing how to manage the linguistic forms, they are bankrupt of social meaning as they are not a perfect mirror of the target culture. Moreover, Kachru (1985) stresses the perspective of equity in English use between the learners as he points out that English use is not only restricted to native speakers but also includes non-native speakers. Kachru (1985) defines the English use in regards of three concentric circles “inner circles”, “outer/extended circles” and “expanding circles”. The inner circles are traditional English countries (UK, Australia, Canada, New Zeeland and USA), while the outer / extended circles are the countries settled by native English speakers that use English as a second language. Some of these are, India, Nigeria, Singapore, and the expanding circles are the countries that use English as a foreign language. Included in this group are Japan, Zimbabwe, Kingdome of Saudi Arabia, China and Egypt. Consequently, the three circles have to be considered equally without any imposition or elimination of any of its norms in and outside the classrooms’ interaction. The following figure depicts Kachru’s points of view.

Figure 1: Kachru’s three concentric circles.

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World Englishes

(Kachru 1992, p. 356)

Many models have been created by many researchers. One of the most important models that anatomize the concept of communicative competence has been presented by Canale and Swain (1980). They point out that communicative competence consists of three components (competencies): Grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence and strategic competence. Grammatical competence contains “knowledge of lexical items and of rules of morphology, syntax, sentence-grammar semantics, and phonology, P. 29” Sociolinguistic competence derived from two sets of rules “knowledge of socio-cultural rules of use and rules of discourse, p. 30”. Strategic competence refers to the spoken and non-spoken communication strategies that should be solicited to overcome the discourse breakdown.

Bachman (1990) proposes a different and effective model based on a notion of communicative competence that includes two components: organizational competence and pragmatic competence. Organizational competence contains the knowledge of grammatical rules (grammatical competence) and the rules of combining them at the sentence and discourse levels (textual competence). On the other hand, pragmatic competence is made up of illocutionary competence, which refers to the knowledge of speech acts and speech functions, and sociolinguistic competence, which refers to the ability to properly use the language in accordance with the context it forms.

The two afore-mentioned models stress a crucial point which is “to be a competent in a language, you need more than simply knowing syntax” (McConachy 2009). More important, interpreting meaning in both spoken and non-spoken discourse is very crucial and useful if the meaning precedes the grammatical and syntactical experiences (Savignon 1997).

Canale (1983) creates a more developed theoretical framework derived from the communicative competence which contains four components. First, linguistic competence: it means the native speakers' knowledge of the rules of grammar and lexis for example, vocabulary, pronunciation, sentence formation and linguistic semantics. Second, sociolinguistic components: it means the socio-cultural rules of use and addresses to what extent the utterances are produced and comprehended properly in different contexts based on contextual factors, such as, participants' status, norms of interaction. Third, discourse competence: this means the knowledge of how to blend meaning with grammatical forms in order to reach to a unified spoken or written text in various genres. Fourth, strategic competence: this means the knowledge of verbal and nonverbal communication strategies in order to get used for two fundamental rationales: A) To remunerate the breakdown taken place in communication caused by limiting conditions in real situation. B) To develop communication effectiveness.

In terms of Hyme’s communicative competence and the work of Canale 1983 and Kachru 1985, a comprehensive theoretical framework of communication has been developed by Acar (2009). He outlines the components of communicative competence to involve five comprehensive components: Linguistic competence, pragmatic competence, discourse competence, strategic competence and intercultural competence. He also stresses that the world English today is not seen as a homogeneous language but it seen as a heterogeneous language with different norms and diverse structures.

As a result of all aforementioned concepts, interactional strategies and crosscultural awareness have to adapt with the diverse contexts of English. Interactional competence in details will be presented.

2.1.1. Interactional competence

Young (2013) points out Interactional competence (Hence forth IC) has been articulated by many applied linguists but it was first coined by Kramsch (1986). In addition, Walsh (2012) adds that IC has been deposited at the heart of communicative competence.

Kramsh (1986) argues that the oversimplified view of language and communication does not pay attention to the progress of researches of SLA because it only concentrates on teaching what will be tested. Although proficiency is needed in learning languages, it does not directly lead to the interactional competence which is needed for a successful interaction. Hence, the trend should move from the traditional proficiency, which depends on lexis and syntax, to an interactional competence which depends on the meaning and behavior strategies of the international scenes. Young (2008, p. 100) defines IC as “a relationship between participants’ employment of linguistic and interactional resources and the contexts in which they are employed…). From young’s definition, it could be understood that the aspect of IC does not depend on the individual skills but depends on how all the interactants use the resources to achieve the mutual and coherent understanding and does vary with the participants, practice and specific contexts.

Hall (1993, 1995) adds to interaction that interactive practices means that the individual’s utterance is not free from social coercion but it is composed of interactive practices that are socio-culturally significance to a community of interactants. Additionally, Young (2011) points out four aspects of IC. First, IC could be observed in a discursive practice of the spoken discourse and that happens due to the concentration of the researchers only on the spoken interaction. Discursive practice is defined by young (2011, p. 3) as “recurring episodes of social interaction in context, episodes that are of social and cultural significance to a community of speakers”. As discursive practices happen frequently in a conversation, participants expect what happens in a practice and what linguistic and nonverbal resource such as gestures, gazing, posture, kinesics and proxemics used by people in managing the practice. Second, IC enables participants to understand and correspond to the expectations of what to say and the way of saying it. This ability of expectation in cross-cultural discourse leads the interactants to interpret forms of utterances in such practice with traditional meanings and might lead to pragmatic failure. In other words, the relationship between pragmatics and IC is fundamental. Third, IC is not the individual’s knowledge of possession, but it is co-constructed by the interactants through discursive practices. Finally, the context of IC should not be restricted to the order of talk that happens at a specific time and place but it subsumes the network of physical, spatial, temporal, social, interactional, institutional, political and historical experiences in which interactants do a practice.

Interactional competence is also important in classrooms between a teacher and students as it enables the students to learn through interactions which are co-constructed. Classroom Interactional competence (CIC) is defined by (Walsh, 2011, p. 158) as “‘teachers’ and learners’ ability to use interaction as a tool for mediating and assisting learning”. It can be seen from the definition that the more teachers and learners are able to use the interaction approach, the greater opportunities for learning are taken place and the more learning is enhanced.

Finally, it should be mentioned that the difference between communicative competence and interactional competence. The latter is an extension of the former. Thus, communicative competence is interested in the individual while the interactional competence is co-constructed or produced by all the participants in interactive practices and is thus specific to that practice (Young 2013).

2.1.2 Pragmatic Competence

Pragmatics is a fairly new linguistic discipline in second language acquisition which became an independent field of linguistic study only about forty years ago. Thus, linguistic paragmatics has been created in language philosophy by philosophers such as Austin (1962), Searle (1969) and Grice (1968). However, the first term of paragmatics was coined by Morris (1938) in his shaping the science of semiotic (semiotics).

Morris (1938, p. 6) distinguishes between the syntax which is defined as “the study of the formal relations of signs”, Semantics which is defined as” the study of the relations of signs to the objects to which the signs are applicable”, and Pragmatics which is defined as “the study of the relation of signs to interpreters”.

The term pragmatics has been widely used when the social linguist shifted the study of the language from the structure into the language use in a specific social context. In more details, Hymes (1972, p. 277) explains communicative competence as:

“[w]e have then account for the fact that a normal child acquires knowledge of sentences, not only as grammatical, but also as appropriate. He or she acquires competence as to when to speak, when not, and as to what to talk about with whom, when, where, in what manner. In short, a child becomes able to accomplish a repertoire of speech acts, to take part in speech events, and to evaluate their accomplishment by others”.

Hence, Hymes’s concept included both linguistic competence and pragmatic competence. Pragmatic competence, thus, has been divided into linguistic competence which is the “the ability to use language form and pragmatic function to understand the speaker, thus to express his own intention exactly”, and social-linguistic competence which is “the ability to use target language properly in target language’s cultural background” (Jie 2010).

On one hand, Yule (1996, p. 3) defines pragmatics as "the study of how more gets communicated than is said". In other words, pragmatics helps the listeners to infer the visible or hidden meaning beyond what is said. In order for that to take place, speakers or writers have to usually use the shared assumptions and expectation in communicating with others (Yule 2010). On the other hand, Crystal (1985, p. 240) defines it as follows:

“[p]ragmatics is the study of language from the point of view of users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction and the effects their use of language has on other participants in the act of communication.”

Leach (1983) and Thomas (1983) created a model that divides pragmatics into pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics aspects. First, pragmalinguistics is considered as the resources for expressing communicative acts and interpersonal meanings. Additionally, Jie (2010) argues that in order to improve effective communication, some adequate strategies, such as, proficiency of language, mutual understanding and basis of shared cultural norms and traditions are needed. The strategies that the speakers could use in cross cultural interactions are divided into two categories: Active strategies and Passive strategies. On the one hand, an active strategy is “the remedy actively adopted to solve communicative difficulties, including cooperative strategy, stalling strategy and paralanguage strategy”. The more the communicators use the active strategies due to the lack of linguistic and social knowledge, the more successful communication without break down is. On the other hand, passive strategies contain suspension, simplification and avoidance. As cross-cultural communication is one of the hidden features, misinterpretations to the utterance in a specific situation might come up. The communication participants have to respect the ideas and propositions that oppose his/her cultural norms.

Second, sociopragmatics is regarded as “the sociological interface of pragmatics', referring to the social perceptions underlying participants' interpretation and performance of communicative action” (Leech 1983, p. 10). Thus, when the interlocuters do not share the same social experiences, they could have sociopragmatics difficulties (LoCastro 2012).

Moreimportantly, the lack of pragmatic competence between the cross-cultural speakers leads to pragmatic error/ failure (Jie 2010). Erickson (1984) mentions that there are three kinds of pragmatic failure: Pragmalinguistic failure, which refers to differences in the linguistic encoding of pragmatic meaning and that failure, is derived from the inappropriate transfer of speech act realization categories or of utterances from the first language to the second language, socioppragmatic failure, which refers to the mismatches in terms of the implied social meaning of speech acts such as the social distance between the participants of the discourse, and the misunderstanding of other participants’ intentions, competence or the cultural knowledge. Thus, ignoring the social context of the learners might lead to “tissue rejection”. The term “ tissue rejection’ is derived from the medical field, where it refers to cases in which organ transplant fails when it does not match the host, and in ELT it refers to the pedagogy and materials that do not match the learner’s culture (Holliday 1992). Hence, it can be seen that pragmatic competence is one of the most crucial parts of the communicative competence. This means learners should be supported to be aware of this, and thus, develop pragmatic competence in the target language.

2.2. Cross-Cultural pragmatics

There are three fundamental approaches in which the role of culture in discourse (spoken or written) is studied, first, by the contrastive approach that compares the native discourses across cultures, second, by the interlanguage approach which focuses on the non-native speakers, third, by the interactive inter-cultural approach which examines and compares the discourse of people of different cultural and linguistic backgrounds speaking either in a lingua franca or in one of the interlocutors’ languages (Clyne 1994).

Cross-cultural pragmatics (henceforth CCP) is one of the fundamental and crucial areas in pragmatics studies. This area contains the comparison of speech acts produced by the languages native speakers and non-native speakers (Balci 2009). Furthermore, Wierzbicka (1991) argues that the CCP field depends on three perspectives. First, in different contexts, people interact differently. Second, these differences show various cultural values, ideas and perspectives. The third perspective is that various ways of talking and diverse styles of communication could be explained. Due to its focus on the specific speech acts across native and non-native speakers, cross-cultural pragmatics is defined as “[t]he study of different expectations among different communities regarding how meaning is constructed (Yule 1996.p. 87).

It could be seen that as people are not assumed to be felicitous in the cross-cultural conversations due to their different interpretations of the meaning, there is a need for the contrastive pragmatics that focuses on the cultural realization of speech acts. Moreover, contrastive pragmatics research tends to use different approaches by using ethnographical frameworks’ creators and followers, for example, role-plays, surveys and discourse completion tasks (DCT). Thus, there have been many patterns of evidence would be used in cultural values and attitudes to assist in discourse analysis such as proverbs, wisdoms, (in)direct elicitation of the attitudes of the speakers, and semantic analysis of cultural key words, (Cliff and Weirzbika 1997).

Many Cross-cultural pragmatics studies have been conducted by researchers in different areas of CCP either cross-sectional studies or longitudinal studies. On one hand, most cross-sectional studies were designed for speech-act production, not to be limited, refusals, compliments and requests. On the other hand, the longitudinal studies focused on speech act realization and development, such as, requests, suggestions and rejections, and thanking and apologies, they are valuable studies in the field of interlanguage pragmatics (Safont 2005).

Locastro (2012) states that Cross-cultural pragmatics has an ambiguous boundary with interalanguage pragmatics. However, Boxer (2002) differentiates between interlanguage pragmatics and Cross-cultural pragmatics as the former constitutes a division of applied linguistics that focuses on SLA; on the contrary, cross-cultural pragmatics is applied sociolinguistics. In the sociolinguistic approach to pragmatics, the term “culture” refers to the values and beliefs about the globe in which they are reflected by the members of a society in everyday situations (Locastro, 2012). Hence, Locastro (2012, p. 81) states that “CCP investigates how human behavior, influenced by participants’ underlying values and beliefs, is translated into instances of language in use. Additionally, Clyne (1994) mentions that contrastive analysis focus on the comparison between the native and nonnative speakers while the interlanguage studies focus on the non-native speakers.

2.3. Interlanguage pragmatics

Interlanguage pragmatics (hence forth ILP) relates to second language studies, and pragmatics. It is a new scope that is derived from pragmatics theory and developments in second language teaching and study in the 1970s. Hence, it depends on pragmatic theories, principles and conceptual structures for examining how SLA/FLA learners encode and decode meaning while they are acquiring their second language. In fact, ILP is deeply triggered by the communicative competence framework of Hymes (1972) and the frameworks of Canale and Swain (1980), Canale (1983) and Bachman (1990) which moved the trend from the traditional grammar pedagogy into the linguistic and social contexts - centered pedagogy and that lead to pragmatic studies concentrates on language learners in 1980s (Schauer 2009).

Kasper and Rose (2002, p. 5) define interlanguage pragmatics as:

“As the study of second language use, interlanguage pragmatics examines how non-native speakers comprehend and produce action in a target language. As the study of second language learning, interlanguage pragmatics investigates how L2 learners develop the ability to understand and perform action in a target language”.

It could be inferred from the aforementioned definition that interlanguage pragmatics belongs to and overlaps with pragmatics and SLA. It is also seen that the definition mirrors two aspects of interlanguage pragmatics research. The first aspect emphasizes that production and comprehension are a crucial part of pragmatic competence of SLA learners. Furthermore, it mirrors that the learners of FLA/SLA should not only be competent of producing utterances that are considered contextually proper in the L2 social context but also they should be at least familiar with what forms proper behavior in many L2 social situations. In short, this aspect highlights the connection between culture and pragmatic competence in FLA/SLA. The second aspect of the definition reflects the fact that interlanguage pragmatics is connected to the pragmatic competence development.

Although there were very few developmental studies of ILP published across the first twenty years of ILP research, two recognized cognitive psychological models have been created that tackle interlanguage pragmatics acquisition. The first model is the noticing hypothesis by Schmidt (1990, 1993). The second model is developed by Bialystok (1991, 1993).

Schmidt (1990, 1993) argues that pragmatic strategies must be noticed by the learners before they are able to process, comprehend and lastly properly implement them. Schmidt (1995, p. 29) defines Noticing as “conscious registration of the occurrence of some event, while understanding refers to “the recognition of some general principle, rule or pattern”. He emphasizes that the learner, who is interested in knowing the speakers of the target language and in getting along with them, might concentrate more on pragmatic norms expressed via L2 input than the learner who is not interested or motivated at all .

The second cognitive psychological model is framed and developed by Bialystok (1991, 1993). In her model, she divides the linguistic processing elements which are mandatory for the linguistic systems analysis into three stages of representation: the conceptual stage, the formal stage and the symbolic stage. The conceptual stage is an initial stage to a new language. Despite the fact that learners can express their intention in this stage, they concentrate only on intended meaning, not on the forms they have selected to convey their intention. Moreover, in this stage they are not able to understand that a particular form is used as a request. The formal stage is the second stage which refers to the stage when the learner is able to make the connection between the form and its function. The symbolic stage is the third stage and refers to the ability of learners to identify the formal-functional elements of the linguistic characteristics in a request and the illocutionary function of those characteristics simultaneously.

Jorda (2005) mentions that the most studies conducted in interlanguage pragmatics up-to-date focused on the use of speech acts by non-native speakers. By that, they adopt concepts and frameworks from investigation on first language use. Hence, interlanguage pragmatics followed that trend of focusing on the first-language pragmatics rather than the focus on SLA.

2.4. Speech Act theory & Politeness Theory

Pragmatic competence is one of the crucial components of communicative competence. It is made up of illocutionary competence, which refers to knowledge of speech acts and speech functions, and sociolinguistic competence, which refers to the ability to use language properly in a specific context as well as referring to the ability to select communicative acts and convenient strategies to act on them based on the situational features in a given context (Eslami-Rasekh 2005).

Historically, Austin (1962) has been regarded as the pragmatics' father (Mott, 2003) and as speech act theory's father (Mey 2001). Based on Austin’s (1962) view, the speaker does not frequently use language to say things, but to do things. Moreover, these utterances could be considered as speech acts. For example “I now pronounce you husband and wife” has been said by the speakers to do something. Such a sentence is called performatives. On the other hand, a sentence such as “New York is a large city” is identified as constatives. Accordingly, he differentiates between three fundamental components of speech acts: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. (Yule 1996) explains that a locutionary act refers to what is said. It is the basic act of utterance and gives a meaning linguistically. If the speaker has difficulty forming words, phrases or sentences in order to create a meaningful utterance in a language that means he/she may fail to produce a locutionary act. For example, if the speaker says “ha mokofa” in English, it is not regarded as a locutionary act. However, if he/she says “I’ve just made some coffee”, that will be considered as a locutionary act. On the other hand, the second dimension of the utterance is the illocutionary act which refers to the purpose or the intention of the speaker while uttering, for example, the speaker might utter “I ’ ve just made some coffee” for making a statement, an offer, an explanation and so on. That is generally called “illocutionary force”. Finally, the perlocutionary force is the third dimension of the utterance in which it refers to the effect the utterance has on the listener. For example, the speaker might say “I ’ ve just made some coffee” assuming that the listener will comprehend the effect the speaker intended which is to get the listener to drink some coffee and that effect could be observed through the action of the listener after he/she had received the speaker’s utterance.

Searle (1969,1975,1976), who is the a student of Austin, developed speech act theory and points out that the illocutionary force of an utterance and perlocutionary effect is based on words and expressions that the speaker selects in his/her utterance. Thus, the illocutionary point of requests is the same as the commands because each tries to let the hearers to do something. However, the illocutionary forces are apparently different (Searle, 1976). Moreimportantly, (Searle 1969, 1975) focuses on the indirect speech acts as it is a more polite form than a direct one.

Yule (1996, p. 47) distinguishes between the speech acts and speech events. Speech acts is defined as " [A]actions performed via utterances and, in English, are commonly given more specific labels, such as apology, complaint, compliment, invitation, promise, or request" while speech events are defined as "A set of circumstances in which participants interact in some conventional way to arrive at some outcome” (Yule 1996, p. 47, 57). In short, the nature of the speech event determines the interpretation of what is said by the hearer. For example, this tea is really cold!

If the above mentioned example has been said on a wintry day, it could be interpreted by the hearer as a complaint. However, if it has been said on a really hot summer’s day, it could be interpreted as praise. In addition, the term speech act is generally known narrowly as the illocutionary force of an utterance. For example, if the speaker says “I will see you later”, it could be interpreted differently by the hearers as a promise or warning.

A speech acts theory will not be completely presented without depicting the speech acts types. Searle (1976, p. 10) distinguishes five types of speech acts: representatives, directives, commissives expressive, and declarations as follows:

Representatives: speakers commit themselves to something being true, for example, to boast or to deduce.

Directives: attempts by speakers to get hearers to do something, for example, to request or to beg.

Commissives: speakers commit themselves to some future course of action, for example, to promise or to threaten.

Expressive: speakers express their psychological state, for example, to thank or to apologize.

Declarations: speakers bring about correspondence between propositional content and the reality, for example, to christen or to appoint.

According to Searle's (1975) typology of speech acts, request is classified beneath the category of directives. Moreover, Yule (1996) argues that speech acts are classified into a direct speech act and an indirect speech act. The difference between them could be made on the basis of structure. In details, if there is a direct relationship between a structure and a function, there will be a direct speech act and if there is an indirect relation between a structure and function, there will be an indirect relation. Additionally, a declarative utilized to create a statement is a direct speech act; while a declarative utilized to make a request is an indirect speech act. For example, when the speaker utters declarative utterance “it is cold outside ”, it would be considered as a direct speech act if it is used to make a statement. However, it would also be considered an indirect speech act if it is used to make (a request). Yule (1996) confirms Searle’s (1969, 1975) hypothesis that, in English, indirect speech acts are, in general, greatly more polite than direct speech acts.

Like speech acts theory, Politeness theory is considered one of the pillars of pragmatics research. In fact, politeness theory has been identified by many scholars since the late 1970s (Kasper, 1990). Thus, Lakoff (1973, 1977) is considered the mother of modern politeness theory (Elene 2001). Lackoff (1977, p. 86) argues that “the pillars of our linguistic as well as non-linguistic interactions are to (1) make yourself clear and (2) be polite”. Thus, Lackoff (1977, p. 88) assumes three rules of politeness which are” Formality: Don’t impose/remain aloof, hesitancy: allow the address his options, and Equality or camaraderie: act as though you and address were equal/ make him feels good”. On the one hand, she argues that there are three factors that determine whether the utterance is polite or not. The first factor is the status difference between the speakers. The second factor is the degree of formality between them while the third factor is the social context of the situation. On the other hand, a philosopher Grice (1975) argues that all human communication is governed by universal principles such as” be brief (the maxim of quantity), be informative (the maxim of quality), be relevant (The maxim of relevance) and be clear (the maxim of manner).

Leech (1983, p. 132) develops politeness principle to be an important component of his interpersonal framework. This politeness principle involves six maxims as follows: “Tact (minimize cost to other; maximize benefit to other), Generosity (Minimize benefit to self; maximize cost to self), Approbation (Minimize dispraise of others; maximize praise of other), Modesty (Minimize disagreement between self and other; maximize agreement between self and other), and Sympathy (Minimize antipathy between self and other; maximize sympathy between self and other)”.

Schauer (2009) commentates that Leech’s maxims are useful in describing why the speaker employs particular strategies and modifiers to construct his/her request utterance. Thus, according to leech’s maxims, the indirect request is regarded as more polite than a direct one in English language due to its un-conditionality and gives the hearer a higher degree of optionality. Li (2008, p. 9) mentions that all of the aforementioned works reported that “politeness can be considered as a communication strategy, the function of which is to maintain a good relationship between interlocutors.”

The most well known model of politeness has been created by Brown and Levinson (1987) which is grounded in Goffman’s (1967) notion of face. He defines the face as “the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself” (Goffman, 1967, p. 66). Brown and Levinson’s (1987) universal politeness model (a person model) contains two components, rationality and face. The former means, the public self- image of a person and it refers to the emotional and social sense of self of every person and is expected to be understood by everyone else, while the latter means "[t]he availability to our model person of precisely definable mode of reasoning from ends to the means that will achieve those ends” (Brown and Levinson 1987, p. 58).

In addition, they suggest two types of face: negative and positive. Negative face is defined as "the want of every component adult member that his/her actions be unimpeded by others” while the positive face is defined as "the want of every member that his/ her wants be desirable to others” (Brown and Levinson, p. 62). Yule (1996) mentions that the word "negative" is not a bad word, but, it is just the opposite pole from the "Positive" word. Additionally, Brown and Levinson (1987) argue that in people’s interactions, each person tends to protect his/her face as well as his/her interlocutor's. However, some speech acts have face-threatening features in which the speaker should avoid. Yule (1996) explains that avoiding a face threatening act (henceforth FTA) is accompanied by face savings acts that use some strategies of positive or negative politeness. In addition, Brown and Levinson (1987) address face-threatening features of the requestive speech acts as the hearer's negative face is threatened by the speaker when (S) puts pressure on (H) for the sake of doing or not doing something.

Three important terms have been illuminated in Brown and Levinson's study (1987) is the redressive action, positive politeness and negative politeness. Redressive action refers to the action which is done by the speaker (S) to the hearer (H) for reducing any possible face damage of the face-threatening act with modifications that demonstrates that no face threat is hoped. Redressive action can happen in either in a form of positive politeness or negative politeness. Positive politeness happens when (S) performs respect to the positive face on (H). On the contrary, negative politeness happens when (S) gives importance to the negative face of (H). He/she avoids restriction of his/her hearer's freedom of an action. Furthermore, Brown and Levinson (1987) suggest a taxonomy which contains four super-strategies to the speakers to choose when attempting to conduct FTAs. These strategies which increase or reduce the level of FTAs are: Bald on record strategy, positive politeness strategy, negative politeness strategy and off record strategy. Bald on record strategy refers to S, concisely and directly without redressive action, performs FTA with maximum efficiency on the account of satisfying H’s face, even to any degree, for example, “Wash the dishes”. Positive politeness strategy refers to that S performs FTA with redressive action which is directed to the H’s positive face, for example, Wash the dishes, honey. Negative politeness refers to S performs FTA with redressive action which is directed towards H’s negative face as in the form of conventionally indirect, for example, would you mind washing the dishes, please? or Can you wash the dishes? Off- record refers to S performs FTA that may have more than one meaning to leave himself/herself out and avoid the responsibility for doing the act as in the non- conventionally indirect form, for example, you left the dishes unclean. From all of these strategies, B & L (1987) point out that there is a direct relation between politeness and directness/indirectness.

Brown and Levinson (1987) also suggest that there are sociological variables which directly affect strategy selection. These variables, which are considered independent variables, are the social distance (D), the relative power (P) and the absolute ranking of impositions (R). These three variables are defined by B & L (1987, p. 74) as follows:

(i) the ‘the social distance’ (D) of S and H (a symmetric relation).
(ii) the relative ‘power’ (P) of S and H ( an asymmetric relation).
(iii) the absolute ranking (R) of imposition in the particular culture.

They suggest that the strategies used between the speakers and hearers depend on their social distance. For example, if the two people are very close to each other, they could have a low degree of social distance and the vice versa. And that leads a person to be more indirect if the degree of social distance is high and he/she might be more direct when the degree of social distance is low. Thus, they also assume that the power between the speakers and hearers could be equal (S=H), more (S>H) or less(S<H). Finally, the ranking of imposition depends on the culture and situation’s degree, importance and difficulty. For example, requesting for a big favor is considered a high rank of imposition while requesting for a small favor is considered a low rank of imposition. For example, asking for a dictionary to look up a word is thought to have a small ranking of imposition, while asking for bicycle is thought to be a high rank of imposition.

2.4.1. Request strategies

As the request is frequently taken place on a daily basis between the native speakers and non-native speakers, and as there are different contexts in which it is assumed to occur, it has not only taken much attention in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) researches in the last three decades, but also has been intensively studied by them (Schauer 2009). Thus, amidst speech acts, requests contain a specifically challenging and problematic sort of social and linguistic interaction for the learners of language as the interlocutors use it to do an action on the hearers (Li 2008). In short, the requester imposes his/her desire on the other participants and puts his/her own needs before theirs. Consequently, a request could threaten the face and that could create a conflict between the native and non-native speakers. Hence, the speakers ought to employ indirect requesting strategies in order to keep the hearer’s face (Brown and Levinson 1987).

Blum-Kulka et al. (1989, p. 17), in their Cross-cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP), suggest that the request sequence might subsume the following parts in their linguistic structures: alerter, supportive moves, head acts and internal modifications. As the head act strategy part is the main element in the request and could be only used by the speaker during his/her request, this study will only depict it.

Head Act is defined as” the minimal unit which can realize a request; it is the core of the request sentence”. The following example will explain the main the head act part in the sentence:

Judith, I missed class yesterday, do you think I could borrow your notes? I promise to return them by tomorrow.

According to Blum-Kulka et al. (1989), when the speaker utters “do you think I could borrow your notes?” it is considered as a head act. They also classify requests’ head act strategies into three major types: Direct strategies (Henceforth D), conventionally indirect (Henceforth CI) strategies and non-conventionally indirect (Henceforth NCI) strategies that could constitute a cross linguistically valid scale of directness. Direct strategies refer when the requester directly expresses himself/herself regardless the hearers' faces. Thus, this type is sub-divided into five sub-levels, Viz, Mood Derivable, Performatives, Hedged Performatives, Obligation Statements and Want Statements. On the other hand, conventionally indirect strategies are defined as “strategies that realize the act by reference to the contextual preconditions necessary for its performance, as conventionalized in a given language” (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989, p. 47). They are sub- divided into two sub-levels, Viz, Suggestory formulae and Quary preparatory. non- conventionally indirect strategies refer to strategies that are not conventionalized in a language and consequently need the hearer to infer the intention of the. They are sub- divided into two sub-levels, Viz, strong hints and mild hints. The following table will provide the request strategy types, definition of coding categories and tokens by Blum- Kulka et al. (1989).

Table 1: Request strategy types, Head Act strategies with definition of coding categories and examples:

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(Blum-Kulka et al. 1989, pp. 278- 280)

The aforementioned strategies are placed on a direct/indirect scale, from the most direct to the least direct strategies. Former researches on requesting behavior highlighted that the relative importance played in terms of power, social distance, situational setting and the extent of imposition might be different across cultures.

2.5. International and local Cultural Studies

The literature shows that many, but not enough, studies have been conducted on the pragmatic awareness (Tanaka and Kawade1982; Bouton 1988; Hinkel 1996; Bardovi- Harlig and Do¨rnyei 1998; Garcia 2004; Tagouchi 2008;Hinkel 1997; Schauer 2006), interlanguage development (Kasper and Schmidt 1996; Schauer 2009; Tagouchi 2011; Lieske 2010; Bayrak 2006; Hakansson and Norrby 2005; Takahashi & Beebe 1987; Cohen and Olshtain 1993; Murad 2012; Tan & Farashaiyan 2012; Kasanga 2006; Fries 2013; Mulken 1996) and Cross-cultural speech acts’ production (Li 2008; Alagozlu and Buyukozturk 2009; Blum-Kulka 1987; Cohen and Olshtain 1980; Takahashi and Roitblat 1994; Balci, 2009; Su, I-Ru.(2010; Blum-Kulka 1986; Blum-Kulka et al. 1989; Blum- Kulka and Olshtain 1984; Jie 2010; Ebsworth et al. 1996; Nelson et al. 1996; Murphy and Neu 1996). Some of these studies, in the international and local level, will be depicted in this section.

Pragmatic awareness has been investigated by many researchers. One of the earliest studies in pragmatic awareness research across cultures has been conducted by carrel and Konneker (1981) using rank orderings in a contextualized condition to investigate differences in judgments of politeness between the native and non-native speakers of English. The subjects were asked to put the sentences in a particular order. They concluded that although non-native speakers of English tended to perceive more distinctive levels of politeness than the native speakers of English, there is a high correlation between the English native speakers and non-native speakers in their politeness judgments in the request utterances.

Similarly, Tanaka and Kawade (1982) conducted two studies to investigate the notion of politeness in requesting between the English native and non-native speakers and their use of it. In their first study, their 20 participants were asked, through a ranking order task, to arrange a set of 12 request sentences in English from the most polite sentence to the least polite one in order to investigate the awareness of the varying degrees of politeness by the two groups and the degree of correlation between them in their politeness judgments. Like Carrel and Konneker (1981), they concluded a high correlation between the English native and non-native speakers’ judgments of politeness in the request utterances. Thus, in their second study, using 10 situations to be answered by 85 subjects (32 adult non-native speakers of English & 53 native speakers of American English), they concluded that both native and non-native speakers use different politeness strategies in terms of different situations.

Along the same lines, Kitao (1990) also conducted a study for a pragmatic awareness. He investigated how native and non-native speakers judged politeness in requests using the same methodology that has been used by Carrell and Konneker (1981) and Tanaka and Kawade (1982). Thus, unlike the aforementioned studies, he utilized a questionnaire to know his participants’ opinions on request strategies. His subjects were classified into three groups (English native speakers, ESL and EFL speakers) and were asked to order the politeness strategies from the most polite into the very rude. He concluded that although there is no significant difference in politeness perceptions between the native subjects and non-native (ESL & EFL) subjects, the ESL students’ scores correlated more highly with the native speaker’ scores than the EFL scores.

Another pragmatic awareness study has been conducted by Hinkel (1997) focusing on speech acts’ advice, utilizing Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs) and Multiple Choice Questionnaire (MCQ) to investigate which level of directness/indirectness was considered appropriate by the native and non-native participants. The subjects in her study were divided into American English (40 native speakers) and Taiwanese Chinese (40 non-native speakers) who reside in US for a period of time and have a high English proficiency. Unlike, Carrell and Konneker (1981), Tanaka and Kawade (1982) and Kitao (1990), Hinkel (1997) concluded that there are significant differences between the native and non- natives’ selection of appropriateness of advice in real-life situations.

Additional to the aforementioned studies, there are some cross-cultural studies focused on more general pragmatic issues. One of these studies has been conducted by Bouton (1988) investigating whether the persons’ cultural backgrounds affect their ability to comprehend the same meanings from conversational implicatures in English. He utilized the multiple questionnaires test. His subjects were divided into native speakers (Americans) used as a control and non-native speakers (Japanese, Koreans, Taiwan Chinese, Mainland Chinese and Spanish/Portuguese). Bouton concluded that there were significant differences between the non-native speakers of English and native speakers.

As a language transfer is very crucial in pragmatic comprehension, another study has been constructed by Su, I-Ru. (2010) investigates the bi-directionality of language transfer (L1 to L2 and the vice versa) at pragmatic level with a focus on the speech acts’ request, utilizing DCTs. The subjects were English native speakers as controls and Chinese native speakers (intermediate and advanced English proficiency). The study concluded that the non-native speakers at both proficiency levels use conventionally indirect strategies significantly less often than native speakers of English in making an English request but more often than non-native speakers of English in making a Chinese request and that shows bi-directional transfer could happen between L1 and L2. Thus, unlike Garcia (2004), there was only a little difference between the non-native speakers of English with different English proficiency levels in their use of conventional indirectives in their L1 and L2.

The review of all the above mentioned studies comparing English native and non- native speakers’ pragmatic awareness reveal that although some studies concluded significant differences between English native and non-native speakers, some other studies concluded that there are no significant differences between them. It could be inferred that these differences in findings might come from the methodological methods, the period of time that non-native speakers exposed to L2 settings or from their proficiency levels.

There are some studies on cross-cultural basis focus on speech acts realization patterns (requests and apologies) comparing similarities and differences between native and non-native speakers of English. One of these studies is conducted by Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1984) investigated the issue of universality in pragmatics through cross-cultural perspectives, utilizing Discourse Completion Tests. The study concluded differences betweem the two groups in their requesting and apologizing strategies.

Blum-Kulka and et al. (1989) constructed one of the most crucial cross-cultural researches in which it is considered a well-integrated collection, cross-cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP), utilizing Discourse completion tests. Their project investigates the cultural differences and similarities between English non-native and native speakers' production of requests and apologies. They concluded differences between the two groups in using the request strategies.

As the pragmatic differences between native and non-native speakers could have a negative impact on their discourses, Blum-kulka (1986) investigated the theoretical and applied domains of this issue in requests across cultures and concluded significant differences between native and non-native speaker in the amount and type of external modifiers.

At the local context, Almazroui (2010) conducted a mixed method study on written discourse in terms of the gender differences in writing. Her subjects were 80 seventh grade students (40 boys and 40 girls) from public schools in Dubai, UAE. The study concluded that although there is no difference between the two genders in formal writing, there are significant differences between them in creative writing.

Based on the aforementioned literature review, which focused on the importance of both linguistic competence and pragmatic competence and focused also on the requestive speech acts across cultures through some theories, models, and studies, this study will attempt to analyze the Discourse Completion Tests of English native and non-native adolescents and will see the results of this study will support which aforementioned hypothesis and study. Hence, in the forthcoming section, methodology, results, discussion and pedagogical implications will be discussed and concluded.

Chapter Three Study

3. The study

This study chapter will provide information about the subjcets who participated in the study, the settings in which the study was carried out, and the linguistic landscape of the study settings. In addition, the instrument which was used in this study will be presented with a brief presentation of other studies that used the same instrument. Moreover, the procedures which were used by the researcher to conduct the study will be examined. Finally, the data analysis of the study will be discussed.

3.1. Subjects

In this study, sixty participants were divided into two groups. The first group consisted of 30 subjects, and their mean age was fifteen year old. This group contained English-speaking students (7 Canadians, 15 Americans and 8 British ) enrolled in 9th grade in two international schools (DIS) & (AIS) in Dubai, UAE. The second group consisted of 30 subjects as well, and their mean age was also fifteen year old. This second group of English-speaking students (3 Pakistanis, 4 Emaratis, 10 Epyptians, 3 Iranians, 3 Malaysians, 3 Indians, 2 Germans and 2 Philippinos) enrolled in 9th grade in the same international schools in Dubai,UAE (AIS), as well as at a school in Ismailia, Egypt (MLS). Thus, the DCTs (Discourse Completion Tests) were accomplished in separate classes of their schools.

3.1.1. Settings & Linguistic landscape of Dubai, UAE & Ismailia, Egypt

Dubai is located in the centre of the United Arab Emirates (henceforth UAE) which is one of the Gulf cooperation Council member states in the Middle East. UAE consists of seven federated Emirates. Of these seven emirates, the three biggest urban concentrations are Sharjah, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Upon its independence on December 2, 1971, the UAE began developing its infrastructure, and it majored in import/re-export trade until it became the central area for trading in the Middle East. The transportation system, particulary in Dubai, connects the different regions internally and externally and have helped UAE to have many expatriates (Younes 2009). However, English is the the only language that is used between the cross-cultural speakers in Dubai. Consequently, English is used as lingua franca (international language) between the cross-cultrual speakers (Randall & Samimi 2010).

Ismailia is one of the Egyptian cities located in the northern east area of Egypt’s borders at suez canal. Goldshmidt Jr. (2004) mentions that linguistically, its spoken and written langauge is Arabic (Cairo speech). Egyptians use English as a foriegn language ( Kachru 1992). As mentioned above, the researcher collected the data from Dubai and Ismailia because both destinations are easily reachable by the researcher. Further, the UAE’s residents use English as a Lingua franca while the Egypt’s residents use English as a foreign language, so all the subjects will typify Kachru’s three concentric circles.

3.2. Instruments

The main instrument in this study is the Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The DCT’s first page (see appendix A) contains information about subjects, schools, and a researcher. It also contains the purpose of the thesis and confidentiality agreement regarding the subjects’ personal data collected by a researcher. It should be mentioned that this lable has been created by the researcher. The remainder of the pages contain 8 diffenrt scenarios. For the native speakers’ questionnaire, the first scenario is about a student asking his collegue about borrowing a dictionary. The second scenario is about a student asking an old lady about borrowing a cell phone for a minute to call his/her partents. The third scenario is about a student asking his elder brother to help him with his/her math homework. The fourth scenario is about a student asking his close friend about borrowing his/her valuable bicycle on the weekend. The fifth scenario is about a student asking his/ her friend’s father to drop him/her at home. The sixth scenario is about a student asking a boy to get the shampoos which are on the highest shelf of a supermarket. The seventh scenario is about a student asking his father to borrow his valuable camera to take photos at his friend’s birthday party. Finally, the eighth scenario is about a student asking another student in another class to translate a spanish article into English. For the non-native speaker’s questionnaire, the same scenarios have been written with slightly modification to be suitable to the non-native speakers. For example, in scenario one, the subject has been changed and in scenario five the name has been changed. Additionally, the participants have been given enough spaces to answer the questions. All of these scenarios have been adopted by Balci (2009).

This type of a DCT is called an open-ended one. Thus, all scenarios have been designed with consideration to the sociolinguisitc variables (P, D & R). It can be seen that DCTs instrument have become widely used as elicitation instruments in cross-cultural analysis and they also easily enable the subjects to give naturalistic responses. Additionally, Beebe & Cummings (1996, p. 80) summarize that Discourse Completion Tests are a highly convinient tool in a speech acts performance research as it:

1) Gathering a large amount of data quickly;
2) Creating an initial classification of semantic formulas and strategies that will likely occur in natural speech;
3) Studying the stereotypical, perceived requirements for a socially appropriate esponse;
4) Gaining insight into social and psychological factors that are likely to affect speech and performance; and
5) Ascertaining the canonical shape of speech acts in the minds of speakers of that language.

Thus, Rintell and Mitchell (1989) conclude that in doing research on pragmatic strategies only, DCT and role play do not show a significant difference in the mood of performance of speech act by native speakers. Thus, in this case, DCTs are recommended since they save time and energy. Blum- Kulka et al. (1989) explain that the DCT questionnaire provides evidence of what the speakers could utter in such different scenarios. In addition, Eslami-Rasekh (2005) clarifies that DCTs are appropriate tools to be used by the researchers as they help in providing a simpler language rather than natural data. However, the time which is given to the subjects to respond in DCTs is longer than the time given to them in a natural, real situation, and that could result in discrepancies between the two data (Cohen 1996). Hence, to avoid this limitation in this paper, the time which is given to the participants is not much in order to let them respond as near as the natural data. In addition, this paper uses the open-ended DCT type in order to give the participants an opportunity of free production rather than the close-ended type (Peterson 2000).

The following table, which has been compiled by the researcher, presents some of the Pragmatic studies using DCTs as a tool of data collection:

Table 2: pragmatic studies utilizing DCTs as a data collection tool

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3.3. Data collection procedure

In this study, three private international secondary schools based in Dubai, UAE and Ismailia, Egypt were selected for participating during the the end of a second semester of the academic year 2012-2013., the gender of participants was not controlled as it was not investigated. However, the age was controlled as it was a required part of the study.

The researcher met the schools’ principles and explained the goal and proceedures of this research. Then, contact btetween the researcher and the school principles was carried out through emails to arrange time, place and proceedures of the tests. Upon all aggreements being made, questionnaire was carried out in two different days during the schools’ normal hours in separate classes, and the subjects’ teachers and the researcher attended the test.

In the first five minutes, the researcher gave the volunteer subjects a brief about the questionaire which was also written on the first paper, and the subjects were informed that they would read each scenario and respond using their natural speech. They were also informed about the given time to complete the questionnaire. Thus, neccessary and optional information which were written on the first paper of the questionnaire were clarified to them. The voluntary subjects filled the DCTs without any problem. In total, 60 fully answered questionnairs were collected and the mean time given to the subjects was calculated to be 30 minutes in this study.

3.4 Data analysis procedures

In order to analyze and compare the given written discourse of the native and nonnative speakers, a mixed methods (quantitative and qualitative) approach was adopted. Although a mixed method research is time consuming, difficult for a single research and more expensive, using numbers with words and pictures could give a precise result (Johnson and Onwuegbuzie 2004).

To answer the first research question, the analysis relied on the taxonomy of Blum- Kulka et al. (1989) in their CCSARP. Moreover, to answer the second research question, the analysis depended on the taxonomy of Brown and Levinson’s Politeness (1987), as they emphasize that the politeness increases when the speaker decreases the degree of imposition on the hearer. thus, indirectness is more polite than directness in cross-cultural interactions. It should be mentioned that all the answers were manually codified using the same coding scheme designed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) in their CCSARP.

Moreimportantly, the data of both English native and non-native subjects was qualitatavely and quantitatively analyzed and compared in order to invistigate the difference between their requesting strategies in terms of social distance, size of imposition and power, and the types of politenss strategies they used to protect the hearer’s face.

3.5 Ethical considerations

The principle of informed consent is one of the crucial elements of ethical considerations in a research using human subjects, and the subjects must voluntarily agree to participate in the research without coercion before filling the data. Additionally, participants have the right to be briefed about the research nature, prupose, usage and procedures (Milroy and Gordon 2003), so the researcher submitted an official letter from the university to the schools’ boards as well as developed an ethics form to provide the schools principals and the subjects with the needed information. Consequently, the school principals explained the study to the students and received their approval. Then, participants signed the form of approval for the researcher and provided him with the suitable date, time, class to conduct a research.

Another ethical consideration that must be well considered while conducting research is to keep all the information of persons or places confidential, and they should only remain known to the researcher (Milroy and Gordon 2003). Consequently, the researcher gave pseudonyms to the schools which the research was conducted in as well as to the informants’ names in the study, whether spoken orally and written.

Chapter Four

4. The Results

In this section, requesting strategies and politeness strategies detected in the English native and non-native speakers will be introduced. As the aforementioned, the requesting strategies that the subjects have employed in their requests will be identified and described based on Blum-Kulka et al. 1989, while the politeness markers that the subjects have employed to soften the request will be based on Brown and Levinson (1987). The real distributions discovered in the subjects’ DCTs will be clearly illustrated in tables and graphs, and will be described with some examples for clarificationas. The following section will address each research question respectively.

4.1. Research Question 1

1) How do the requesting strategies for the native and non-native speakers of English differ in accordance with:

a) Social distance (SD)
b) Size of imposition (I)
c) Power (P)

Table 3 below shows the distribution of English native- speakers’ strategies while requesting.

Table 3: The distributions of requesting strategies employed by English native speakers while requesting.

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The following figure will more focus on the distributions of direct, conventionally indirect and non-conventionally indirect strategies employed by the native speakers for more clarification:

Figure 2: total distributions of native speakers’ requesting strategies.

The close analysis of the native speakers’ data in the aforementioned table 3 shows that the English native speakers varied their requesting strategies among the direct and indirect types with different distribution. They utilized the direct type with a percentage of 10 % distributed between hedged performatives 7.5 % and want statement strategies 2.5 %. An example of the direct type of the real data: Dad, it ’ s my friend ’ s birthday. I really want to use your Camera. They have not utilized other direct request strategies. The most frequent type utilized by the native speakers of English is the conventionally indirect type 82.5 % through the Query preparatory strategy. An example of the conventionally indirect type: May I borrow your dictionary, please? However, they have not used suggestory formula strategy. They also utilized the non-conventionally indirect type by 7.5 % through the strong hint strategy. An example of the non-conventionally indirect type: I heard you are good at translating from Spanish into English. I have a Spanish article but I do not know anything about Spanish. However, they have not utilized the mild hint strategy at all.

Table 4 below shows the distribution of English non-native- speakers’ strategies while requesting.

Table 4: The distributions of requesting strategies employed by English non-native speakers while requesting.

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The following figure will more focus on the distributions of direct, conventionally indirect and non-conventionally indirect strategies employed by the non-native speakers for more clarification:

Figure 3: total distributions of non-native speakers’ requesting strategies.

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The close analysis of the non-native speakers’ data in the aforementioned table 4 shows that the English non-native speakers varied their requesting strategies among the direct and indirect types with different distribution. They utilized the direct type by 15 % distributed between Mood derivable strategies .83 %, hedged performatives 6 % and want statement 11.7 % strategies. An example of a direct type: Do my H.W. for me. However, they have not utilized other direct request strategies. The most frequent type utilized by the non-native speakers of English is the conventionally indirect type (80 %) through the suggestory formula .83 %, which is below one percent, and Query preparatory strategy 79.2 %. An example of the conventionally indirect type: How about taking me with you? They also utilized the non-conventionally indirect type by 5 % through the strong hint strategy. An example of the non-conventionally indirect type: Dad, I know your camera is valuable for you but I promised my friend to take photos at his birthday. However, they have not utilized the mild hint strategy at all.

To answer the first research question, the comparison of the requesting strategies types will be presented in table 5 and will be described, too.

Table 5: Comparison of the requesting strategies types employed by both groups.

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The following figure will more focus on the distributions of direct, conventionally indirect and non-conventionally indirect strategies employed by both groups for more clarification:

Figure 4: comparison of total distributions of native and non-native speakers’ requesting strategies.

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The aforementioned table 5 shows that there are some similarities and different between the requesting types of English native and non-native speakers in terms of social distance (SD), size of imposition (I) and power (P) as follows: They all similarly utilize the three types of requesting strategies (Direct, conventionally indirect and non-conventionally indirect requests). They also utilize the same order of the overall requesting types percentages (the conventionally indirect type, then, the Direct type, then, the non-conventionally indirect type). However, the native speakers’ percentage of every type is different to the non-native speakers’. While the native speakers utilized the direct type by 15 %, the non-native speakers scored higher than the native speakers in their usage 10 % to it. Thus, the native speakers depended more on the conventionally indirect types by 82.5 % than the non-native speakers by 80 %. Finally, the native speakers scored higher than the non-native speakers in their usage of the nonconventionally indirect type as the former utilized it by 7.5 % while the latter utilized it by 5 %.

It could be seen from table 5 that native speakers utilized the indirect types more frequently than the non-native speakers did. In cross-cultural interaction, the requestive interpretation is word order between the speakers than the linguistic features. If the requestive interpretation does not match the pragmatic context (regardless the linguistic criterion), the pragmatic failure might happen so often between the culturally different speakers. That might have been caused by L1 transfer to L2 for the non-native speakers and the lack of pragmatic awareness between both speakers.

4.2. Research Question 2

2) What types of politeness markers do native and non-native speakers utilize to soften the effects of face threatening acts?

Table 6 below shows distribution of English native- speakers’ politeness strategies while requesting.

Table 6: The distribution of politeness strategies employed by English native speakers while requesting.

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The following figure will more focus on the distributions of politeness strategies employed by the native speakers for more clarification:

Figure 5: total distributions of native speakers’ politeness strategies.

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The aforementioned table 6 points out the different politeness strategies employed by English native speakers . They utilized all four strategies. The table shows their differnt usage with different distribution.

As seen from the table, the native speakers utilized a bold on record strategy by 2.5 %. An example of an on record strategy of the real data: Lend me your bike for today. Moreover, they also used the positive strategy by 7.916 %. An example of a positive politeness of the real data: Dad, lend me your camera for today. I will take care of it. Thus, they used the negative politeness strategy by 82.083 %. An example negative politeness of the real data: May I please borrow your dictionary? Or Can I please use your bike to go somewhere? Finally, they used an off-record strategy by 7.5 percent. An example of an off-record strategy of the real data: Name: I know you ’ ve got a lot of HW but I don ’ t understand some questions.

Table 7 below shows the frequencies and distributions of English non-native- speakers’ politeness strategies while requesting.

Table 7: The distribution of politeness strategies employed by English non-native speakers while requesting.

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The following figure will more focus on the distributions of politeness strategies employed by the non-native speakers for more clarification: Figure 6: total distributions of non-native speakers’ politeness strategies.

The aforementioned table 7 points out the different politeness strategies employed by English non-native speakers. They utilized brown and Levinson’s (1987) four strategies. The table shows the their differnt usage with different distribution.

As seen from the table, the non-native speakers utilized a bold on record strategy of by 7.083 %. An example of an on record strategy of the real data: Come help me with my maths homework. Moreover, they also utilized the positive strategy of by 9.166 %. An example of a positive politeness of the real data: Honey, I am happy to speak with you and I need your help to translate this topic for me. Thus, they utilized the negative politeness strategy of by 78.75 %. An example negative politeness of the real data: Hello, may I please borrow your mobile phone for a minute? I really need to call my parents, please. Finally, they used an off-record strategy of 5 percent. An example of an off-record strategy of the real data: Dad, I know you camera is valuable but I promised my friend to take photos in his birthday, please. Or, Dad, I need a amera tonight and I don ’ t know what to do.

Table 8 below shows the frequencies and percentages of all politeness strategies employed by English native and non-native speakers while requesting. Table 8: Comparison of politeness strategies employed by both groups.

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The following figure will more focus on the distributions of politeness strategies employed by both groups for more clarification:

Figure 7: total distributions of native and non-natives’ politeness strategies.

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The aforementioned table 8 shows that both native and non-native speakers utilized the 4 super-strategies of Brown and Levinson (1987). It can be seen from table 8 that in comparison to the politeness strategies employed by both groups, the non-native speakers utilized bold on record strategy more frequent than the native speakers did. Thus, they also utilized positive politeness more frequent than the native speakers did. On the other side, the native speakers utilized negative strategy more frequent than the non-native speakers did. Additionally, they also utilized the off-record strategy more frequent than the non- native speakers did. According to Brown and Levinson’s taxonomy (1987), the politeness strategies (Off-record > Negative > Positive > Bold on record) have been arranged from the most polite to the least polite. Hence, it could be inferred that the native speakers utilized politeness markers more frequently than the non-native speakers and paid much more attention to strategies that could soften the face of the hearers. That is apparent especially in the off-record strategies which have been employed by the native speakers 7.5 % while they have been employed by the native speakers much less 5 %. Consequently, there is a significant difference between the two groups in utilizing the politeness strategies and that could let us say the native speakers utilized politeness markers more politely than the non-native speakers did. This result is fairly expected because the native speakers lean to use indirect strategies in terms of far social distance, high size of imposition and high power of the hearers.

Chapter Five Discussion

5. Discussion

When Hymes (1967 , 1972) theorized the communicative competence, many researchers moved from the linguistic forms of the language into what is said in a specific social context forming a meaning. For example, Halliday 1972, Jie 2010; Leach 1983; Bachman 1990; Holiday 1992 ; Cliff and Wierzbicka1997; Thomas 1983; Rose 2005; Schauer 2009; Kasper and Rose 1999; Blum-kulka and Olshtain 1984 , 1987; Blum-Kulka et al. (1989); Jie 2010 focused on the meaning in a particular context rather than the linguistic forms. Thus, interactional competence by Kramsch (1986) derived from the communicative competence and deposited at the heart of it to develop the interactions between the cross-cultural speakers and to guide the teachers and students for an effective and efficient communications. As mentioned in the literature review, ccommunicative competence is only interested in the individual, alternatively, the interactional competence is co-constructed or produced by all the participants in interactive practices and is thus specific to that practice. Hence, interactional competence is very crucial to be applied in classrooms, particulary, the cross-cultural classrooms. It creates a good environment to the learners for developing his/her seond language acquisition. Other researchers mentioned in the literature review focused on the importance of pragmatic competence ,which also derived from the communicative competence particularily the speech acts across cultures. As a consquence of Austins’ (1962) speech acts theory, then, his student, Searl (1969, 1975, 1976) and others mentioned in the literature review, the utterance could refer to many meanings and the intended meaning should be interpreted by the hearer as it was intended by the speaker. Otherwise, pragmatic error(s) / failure could happen between them. It also has been discussed in the literature review that the indirect speech acts is more polite than the direct one. Additionally, the politeness theory, which has been created by Goffman (1967), then, developed by Lackoff (1973, 1977) and Leech (1983) and finally by Brown & Levinson (1987) who present universal politeness strategies within a person model, has also derived from the communicative competence and pragmatic competence. Brown and Levinson (1987) suggest a taxonomy which contains four super-strategies which are bold on record, positive, negative and off record strategies. These strategies could increase or decrease the imposition on the hearer(s) by the speaker(s), thus, in order to avoid the face threatening act on the hearer, the speaker should use the indirect strategies because they are more polite than the direct ones. Moreimportantly, as the request is one of the speech acts type and it is more frequently used than other types, thus, it contains a specifically challenging and problematic sort of social and linguistic interaction for the learners of language as the interlocutors use it to do an action on the hearers (Li 2008), this study focuses on the speech acts requests’ strategies & politeness markers between three English native counries (Canada, US & UK) and eight English non-native countries ( Pakistan, Emarates, Egypt, Iran, Malaysia, India, Germany and Philippines). The subjects of this study were divided into two groups. The first goup is English-speaking (7 Canadians, 15 Americans and 8 British ) enrolled in 9th grade in international schools, while the second group were English non-native speakers (3 Pakistanis, 4 Emaratis, 10 Epyptians, 3 Iranians, 3 Malaysians, 3 Indians, 2 Germans and 2 Philippinos) enrolled in 9th grade in international schools.

On one hand, based on Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) main requesting strategies, nine head act strategies were set and classified into three categories, namely, direct, conventionally indirect and non-conventionally indirect strategies. Each category has subcategories such as Direct strategy as a category divided into mood derivable, performtives, hedged performatives, obligation statements, and want statement. Conventionally indirect strategy divided into suggestory formula and quary preparatory. The non-conventionally indirect strategies divided into strong hints and mild hints.

The requesting head act strategies identified in the native speakers’ data were four sub-categories (hedged performatives and want statement, query preparatory and strong hint) out of nin categories proposed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). However, all of these available subcategories typify the three major categories (direct, conventionally indirect and non-conventionally indirect strategies). Additionally, other subcategories in terms of Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) taxonomy were not found in the native speakers’ data. Additionally, requesting head act strategies identified in the non-native speakers’ data were six subcategories (mood derivable, hedged performatives, want statement, suggestory formula, query preparatory and strong hints) out of nine subcategories proposed by BlumKulka et al. (1989). However, all of these available subcategories typif the three major categories (direct, conventionally indirect, and non-conventionally indirect strategies). Further, other subcategories in terms of Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) taxonomy were not found in the non-native speakers’ data.

On the othe hand, based on Brown and Levinson (1987) four super-strategies were set and detected in the data. These strategies which increase or reduce the level of FTAs are: bald on record strategy, positive politeness strategy, negative politeness strategy, and off record strategy. They point out that there is a direct relation between politeness and (in) directness.

In terms of Brown and Levinson (1987), the requesting politeness strategies identified in the native speakers’ data were four categories (bold on record, positive strategy, negative strategy, and off-record). Similarly, requesting politeness strategies identified in the non-native speakers data were four strategies (bold on record, positive strategy, negative strategy, and off-record).

The reason behind conducting this study was to see how similar/different the speech act request’s strategies of English native and non-native adolescents are and how similar/different their politeness strategies are in order to focus on avoiding the pragmatic error/failure while they are interacting with one another because the hearer might think of an irrelevant meaning of the speaker of another culture.

The data revealed that there are significant similarities and differences between English non-native and native subjects while requesting in terms of the aforementioned sociolinguistic variables. English native speakers as well as English non-native speakers similarly use the three types of requesting strategies (direct, conventionally indirect and non-conventionally indirect requests), and that means they all aware of the three types. The data also reveals that the most commonly used type is the conventionally indirect. Thus, the second most commonly used type is the direct strategy. Finally, the least commonly used type is the non-conventionally indirect. However, the native speakers’ percentage of each type of usage is different to the non-native speakers’. Despite the fact that the native speakers used the non-conventionally indirect type at 82.5 percent, the non-native speakers used it at 80 percent. Thus, although the native speakers used the direct type at 10 percent, the non-native speakers used it at 15 percent. Finally although the native speakers used the non-conventionally indirect type at 7.5 percent, the non-native speakers used it at 5 %. That reveals significant differences between the two groups in utilizing the request strategies and could lead to pragmatic error/failure between them. This study is near Balci (2009)’s finding as he found differences between the native and non-native speakers in their usage to the request’s strategies employed by both native and non-native speakers.

The data also revealed that there are significant similarities and differences between the politeness strategies utilized by both English native and non-native speakers. Similarly, they use the 4 super-strategies of Brown and Levinson (1987). The most commonly used strategy by the two groups is the negative politeness type. However, the English native speakers used it more than 82 percent and the English non-native speakers used it approximately 78 percent. The second most politeness strategy used by both groups is the positive strategy. However, the English native speakers used it more than 9 percent and the English native speakers used it at 7.91 percent. Differently, in terms of the arrangement and the percentage, although the third most politeness strategy used by the native speakers was the Off-record strategy with a percentage of 7.5 percent, the third most politeness strategy used by the non-native speakers was the bold on record strategy with a percentage of more than 7 %. In addition, the fourth and last politeness strategy used by the native speakers was bold on record strategy with a percentage of 2.5 percent while the fourth and last politeness strategy used by the non-native speakers was the off-record type of 5 percent. More important, according to the taxonomy of B & L (1987), which arranges the politeness scale from the most polite to the least polite as off-record, negative, positive and on record strategies, the native speakers utilized more polite strategies than the non-native speakers. That means they consider the FTAs more than the native speakers. What this study revealed is SLA / FLA students lean towards being less polite than their native counterparts while using the politeness strategies in specific situations. This result is near Tanaka and Kawade’s (1982) study and on the contrary of Pishghadam & Navari (2012) as they concluded that the English ads were more direct than the Persian ads as English speakers lean to be more direct and less indirect than the Persians (English non-native speakers).

The result of this study might come to this end because the English native speakers lean towards using the indirect ways more than ESL and EFL students. On the contrary, English non-native speakers might lean towards transferring their L1 into L2. When the non-native speakers' L1 and culture were characterized with the direct strategies which is more unmarked according to the Markedness theory (more likely to be transferred) while their target language and culture were characterized with the indirect strategies which is marked (less likely to be transferred), they transferred the directness of their L1 into their L2 performance (Tran 2002). In addition, it may come from the lack of pragmatic awareness for both groups. Finally, the conventional indirect strategies, not to be limited, could you…..? Would you….? Can you…..?, are easily taught in ESL/EFL classrooms than non-conventional indirect strategies.

5.1. Pedagogical Implications

The present study revealed that although some what similarities between native and non-native speakers in their usage to the requesting strategies, there are significant differences between them in prefereing the indirect types of these strategies. In other words, the native speakers prefer the indirect types (conventionally indirect and incoventioanlly indirect), but the non-native speakers prefer the direct and conventionally ones. That in turn sheds the light on strategies that could be used by, on one hand, English teachers either in EFL/ESL classrooms and/or the cross-cultural classrooms. In order to avoid pragmatic errors/failure, there are some objectives for an English teacher to teach English. In details, they should raise the socio-cultural awareness of learners by many ways. First, they should not only focus on teaching syntax and lixicon as proposed by chomsky, but also broaden their teaching to involve semantics as proposed by Hymes through the communitcative competence. For example, in listening skills, they could apply the SPEAKING model through rasing different questions, for instance, by using language- based questions, ie, based on the discourse marker ” I see” in the dialogue, what does “I see” mean? Likewise, in function-based questions, ie, based on “I see”, where does the speaker show interset? Or by comparative questions, ie, in your culture, how do people show interest to the speaker? Further, by general specultative questions, ie, why do you think X refused the invitation of Z (McConachy 2009). These types of questions could raise the sociocultural aspects of the learners by activating his/her cognitive thinking as well as by letting him/her comprehend the differences in cross-cultural communications. Thus, they could adopt the reformulation strategies in helping their students to raise their cross-cultural awareness. For example, a teacher could ask his / her students to perform speech acts, then, he/she could ask the native students to write down or utter what he or she could perform in such a situation in the native speaking context. Here, the non-native students could notice and identify the differences between their versions and the native version in different contexts. Moreimportantly, the teacher has to emphasize language and culture as they are inseperable and correlated to each other through varying their teaching strategies and activities to be suitable for all cross-cultural students. Last but not least, the teacher should anticipate the areas of difficultuy in L2 pragmatics and discourse acquisition and prevent a negative pragmatic and discourse transfer that could be done by learners and invest the positive pragmatic and discourse transfer that is available in L1 & L2 of the learners. Finally, the teacher has to encourage his/ her students to interact in and out classrooms with other cultural speakers. The teacher should not depend on their intuition while they are teaching to their students but they could make a good use of communicative competence & interactional competence, pragmatic competenc, speech acts theory and politeness theory as presented in the literature review and discussion to help their students to interact in the classroom with avoidance to the miscommunication by creating space for learners to interact with one another, creating mutual understanding and engaging the students in different teachers-managed dialogues. Additionally, the teacher could help their students to make cross-cultural communications through posting their comments on blogs, facebook interaction, twitter and so on.

On the other hand, as language and culture are inseperable, the learners should not only depend on their teachers in acquiring the second language, but they should have a vital role in this process. They should move from cultural awareness into socio-rcultural awareness (Baker 2012). L2 Learners should find some ways to interact with speakers of different cultures. They should be aware of the pragmatic differences and notice how others speak and what is the meaning they employ. They could do that by taking a good use of the modernized technological devices to develop their pragmatic competence - for instance, face book, twitter, blogs, and so on. Furthermore, English native speakers should get rid of the concept of owing the English language and give the EFL/ ESL students some opportunities to express their ideas, emotions and culture, and grasp the meaning rather than the linguistic features. In other words, learners across Kachru’s inner, outer and expanding circles ought to respectably speak with one another.

The data also reveales that although there are some what similarities between the two groups in employing the polite strategies, there are significant differences in utilizing them. The native speakers utilized more polite strategies than the non-native speakers. This sheds the light to English teachers to utilize the naturally speech acts’ video tapes in the classrooms. They could let the students to listen to and watch conversations carefully. Then, ask them to analyze the social distance, power and size of imposition that are available in a specific situation and ask them to make a decision about the level of these factors. Thus, teachers could either creat a new situation to their students and let them decide about the aforementioned sociocutural variables and perform speech acts about specific subjects or let the students create it and ask another group of students to perform it. Finally, the teacher could use Brown and Levinson’s person model in order to evaluate the situational factors in specific speech act realizaitons and show his / her students the similarities and differences between cultures. That could help the students to understand the pragmatic differences across cultures and how to deal with different culturally speakers to avoid pragmatic errors/fairlure.

The educational policy makers, syllabus and design makers, authers, and teachers should incorporate educational materials that are based on the person model of Brown and Levinson (1987), which is discussed by this study and consider the social variables to show how native and non-native speakers utilize the requestiong strategies and what most polite and least polite ones are while they are requesting. The materials could depict natural cross-cultural speech acts with analysis to the social variables by native and non-native speakers. That would give the students a good idea in dealing with each other in cross- cultural communications. Moreimportantly, they should depict balanced data in the textbooks respecting Kachru’s three concentric circles equally without any cultural bias. For example, they could depict conversations by native with native speakers, non-native with native speakes, and non-native with non-native speakers. Moreover, by the pragmatic and discourse markedness hypothesis, they should pay more attention to the teaching and learning L2 strategies as they are more marked than the L1 ones in comprehending the similar communicative acts (Tran 2002). Additionally, they also should give opportunities to EFL/ESL students to study abroad in the target language for a period of time to know the target language norms. Consequently, when they come back to their countries, they could pass the acquired culture to their non-native counterparts. Finally, learners should read, ask, and search for the different cultural norms and what is polite and impolite from others’ perspectives.

5.2. Limitations of the study

One of the limitations of this study is that as this paper includes only 30 native speakers and 30 non-native speakers of English, it could be misleading to generalize the requesting patterns used by this population sample. It should have involved mor native and non-native speakers to make accurate and diffinet gerneralization. Another point could be considered as a limitation to this study is that the subjects have been chosen - in this study - only in terms of the nationality and age. However, their actual proficiency levels have not been known to the researcher by the schools’ principles. Hence, the study only considered that they were in the same grade and their age is similar. Hence, their proficiency levels should be near to each other. Thus the same educational materials and information have been taught to them. Moreover, the gender was not controlled in this study.

Finally, although this study has followed the coding scheme proposed by Blumkulka et al. (1989), the main limitation was that the study used written Discourse Completion Tests instead ofspoken/oral DCTs due to time constraints. Despite the researcher overcoming this problem by controlling the time given to the subjects and making the conditions surrounding them to be as near to natural as the spoken data, it could be one of the study’s limitations. Hence, if the researcher had had enough time, he would have used natural data with interviews simultanously.

Chapter Six Conclusion

6. Conclusion and Areas for further research

Among the aims of this study was to investigate how the speech acts’ requesting strategies differ between native and non-native speakers of English in accordance with the social distance, size of imposition, and power. To do so, 30 native speakers and 30 non- native speakers of English were chosen from three international private schools in UAE and Egypt. The DCT has been utilized and distributed to the subjects with ethical considerations. The study utilized the taxonomy of Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) to the requesting strategies with the same coding manual that has been created by them. The age was controlled as all the subjects were between 13-15 years old while the gender was not controlled as it was not necessary for this study.

Another point that this study focused on was the types of politeness markers have been utilized by the two aforementioned groups while requesting to soften the effects of face threatening acts. In other words, the second point was to know whether the English native or non-native speakers more considered the face of the hearer/hearers in accordance with the aforementioned three factors to avoid pragmatic failure in cross cultural communications. To do so, the study utilized the taxonomy of Brown and Levinson (1987) to the universal politeness strategies and the data have been coded manually, too.

The study showed that although there were similarities between the English native and non-native speakers in utilizing all the three main requesting types which are direct, conventionally indirect, and non-conventionally indirect strategies, there were significant differences in the distribution of these strategies between the two groups. In short, the native speakers utilized more indirect strategies than the non-native speakers who preferred more direct ones. This finding is consistent with Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) and it is also in consistent with (Balci 2009).

The study also showed that although there were similarities between the English native and non-native speakers in utilizing all the four super-strategies created by Brown & Levinson (1987) which are, from least polite to the most polite, on-record, positive, negative, and off-record strategies, the native speakers significantly chose more indirect strategies than the non-native speakers did. In short, the native speakers chose more polite strategies than the non-native speakers did. This finding supports the hypothesis of Brown and Levinson (1987) that the direct strategies are less polite than the indirect ones. It also supports Yule’s (1996) claims that, in English, the indirect strategies are more polite than the direct ones. This finding is consistent with Tanaka and Kawade (1982) and approves Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness hypothesis.

These study’s results may have come to this conclusion because of many reasons. First, according to Tran’s (2002) hypothesis, as the English non-native speakers’ L1 and culture were described with the direct strategies, they transferred their L1directness into their target language which is characterized with the indirect types. Second, it could have happened because the direct and conventionally indirect strategies are easier to teach in EFL/ESL classrooms and that reflected on the English learners in utilizing them. Finally, It also could have happened because the lack of pragmatic awareness for both groups.

These results ring the bell to researchers, teachers, authors, and educational decision makers that in cross-cultural interactions, pragmatic error/failure could happen between the culturally different interactants because they pragmatically could not understand what is meant of what is said. It greatly urges them to not only focus on the linguistic factors but they should also include the social factors in their materials, teaching strategies, syllabus and design, teaching, and learning programs based on the interactional competence, pragmatic competence, speech acts theory, and politeness hypothesis that all have derived from Hymes’ communicative competence (1967, 1972).

Additionally, for the future research, it would be desirable to do the same research on a larger sample size across culturally different groups in order to be able to make generalizations more precisely. It might be better to use SPSS in calculating the statistics.

It also might be useful to repeat the same study with a different methodology, such as, an open role play to collect the natural data or a DCT with a role play together. Finally, a study investigating teachability of pragmatic competence might be useful in cross-cultural pragmatics field. It is also recommended for the future research to do the same research with dividing the sample into three groups such as a native speakers group, a non-native speakers group from ESL context, and a non-native speakers group from EFL context. Moreover, the future research could investigate other speech act productions, not to be limited to, apologies, refusals, and compliments, and so on. It is also recommended to do the same study with dividing the samples into three groups, a native speakers group, a non- native speakers group from ESL setting, and a non-native speaker group from EFL setting. Finally, the pragmatic development between the English native and non-native speakers with different proficiency levels might be carried out.

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Appendices

Appendix A: DCT

illustration not visible in this excerpt

Hello, my name is from the British University in Dubai. We are currently conducting a survey of students’ views on a number of issues and would like to ask you kindly to participate in this survey. You are kindly asked to answer the questions in this DCT as purely as your natural answers in real equivalent situations. Please be assured that we are not selling or soliciting anything and that your answers will be kept strictly confidential and will be used only for the research's purpose.

Appendix A: Discourse Completion Tests

Native Participants’ Discourse Completion Test

Please read the situations carefully and write what you would say in that particular situation to the gaps provided after each question. You may leave the questions that you do not want to answer unanswered:

REQUESTS

1. In Spanish class you are reading a passage and the teacher wants you to find the meanings of the new vocabulary. But you realize that you forgot your dictionary. Your friend is sitting next to you. You want to borrow his/her dictionary. What would you say?

2. You have just arrived in Boston. You came here to take a very important exam. You are at the bus station. Your parents wanted you to call them when you arrive at the bus station. However, the battery of your cell phone is low. You are sure that your parents are worried about you. You sit on a bench next to an old lady. After some hesitation, although you don‘t know the lady, you decide to ask for her cell phone to call your parents. What would you say to the lady?

3. You have a lot of homework and you must finish it by tomorrow. There are some Math problems that you can‘t solve by yourself. Your elder brother is studying Math at college. You want him to help you with your Math homework. What would you say to your elder brother?

4. You want to go out this weekend. You want to borrow your close friend‘s bicycle. However, you know s/he usually rides his/her bicycle on the weekends and that it is really valuable to him/her. What would you say to your friend?

5. Your classes are over and you must go home early because you have a lot of homework. But your home is very far from the school. Your classmate Pete lives on your street and his father came to school by car to take him home. You decide to ask Pete‘s father for a ride. What would you say?

6. You are in a supermarket. You want to buy some shampoo. However, the shampoo you want to buy is on the highest shelf and you cannot reach it. There is a boy near you. You decide to ask him to get you one of those shampoos. What would you say?

7. Tomorrow night is your close friend‘s birthday party. You promised him/her to bring a camera with you to the party to take photos. For this reason, in the evening when your father comes home from work you decide to ask for his camera. You know this camera is very valuable to your father, but you must borrow it for tomorrow night. So you ask your father. What would you say?

8. You must write an essay on a topic and turn it in tomorrow. You have just found from the internet an interesting article on the topic which is one page long, but it is written in Spanish. You can‘t read the article in Spanish and you need to translate it into English. You have just heard that there is a student in another class who understand Spanish and can write in Spanish very well. Although you have never spoken to the student before, you decide to ask the student to translate this article into English. When you see the student what would you say?

Non-native Participants’ Discourse Completion Test

Please read the situations carefully and write what you would say in that particular situation to the gaps provided after each question. You may leave the questions that you do not want to answer unanswered:

REQUESTS

1. In the English lesson you are reading a passage and the teacher wants you to find the meanings of the new vocabulary. But you realize that you forgot your dictionary at home. Your friend is sitting next to you. You want to borrow his/her dictionary. What would you say?

2. You have just arrived in Ankara. You came here to take a very important exam. You are at the bus station. Your parents wanted you to call them when you arrive at the bus station. However, the battery of your cell phone is low. You are sure that your parents are worried about you. You sit on a bench next to an old lady. After some hesitation, although you don‘t know the lady, you decide to ask for her cell phone to call your parents. What would you say to the lady?

3. You have a lot of homework and you must finish it by tomorrow. There are some Maths problems that you can‘t solve by yourself. Your elder brother is studying Maths at university. You want him to help you with your Maths homework. What would you say to your elder brother?

4. You want to go out this weekend. You want to borrow your close friend‘s bicycle. However, you know s/he usually rides his/her bicycle on the weekends and that it is really valuable to him/her. What would you say to your friend?

5. Your lessons are over and you must go home early because you have a lot of homework . But your home is very far from the school. Your classmate Serdar lives on your street and his father came to school by car to take him home. You decide to ask Serdar‘s father for a ride. What would you say?

6. You are in a supermarket. You want to buy some shampoo. However, the shampoo you want to buy is on the highest shelf and you cannot reach it. There is a boy near you. You decide to ask him to give you one of those shampoos. What would you say?

1. Tomorrow night there is your close friend‘s birthday party. You promised him/her to bring a camera with you to the party to take photos. For this reason, in the evening when your father comes home from work you decide to ask for his camera. You know this camera is very valuable to your father, but you must borrow it for tomorrow night.

So you ask your father. What would you say?

8. You must write an essay in a topic and turn it in tomorrow. You have just found from the internet an interesting article on the topic which is one page long, but it is written in English. You can‘t read the article in English and you need to translate it into Turkish. You have just heard that there is a student in another class who understand English and can write in English very well. Although you have never spoken to the student before, you decide to ask the student to translate this article into Turkish. When you see the student what would you say?

Appendix B: Consent Form

To be completed by the student and submitted to the Ethics Research Committee

NAME OF RESEARCHER: Elsayed Mahmoud Elsayed

CONTACT TELEPHONE NUMBER: 00971503034157

EMAIL ADDRESS: sayedmahmoud3@hotmail.com

DATE:

PROJECT TITLE: A Cross-cultural study of pragmatically requestive speech act realization patterns

BRIEF OUTLINE OF PROJECT :

My primary purpose of this research is to identify and compare pragmatically requestive speech acts strategies and politeness strategies employed by English native and non-native adolescents. In the meanwhile, this study aims at achieving the following: Depicting the ethnography of communications theory which contains communicative competence, and its components and consequences with a high light on interactional competence.

Assessing and comparing the perceptions of appropriacy for pragmatic functions of requests between the native and non-native speakers.

Depicting and defining Pragmatic competence, speech act, Politeness theory and Speech event in order to improve the pedagogy of pragmatics in EFL/ESL settings and to eliminate the intuition principle that teachers use in the cross-cultural classrooms.

In order to develop the pragmatic competence to the students in classes, this study endeavors to identify and compare the requesting strategies and politeness markers which are used by the different culturally students. There is a need to guide our students to use the more polite strategies to protect the face of the speakers / hearers and to make effective interaction between them in and out the classes.

MAIN ETHICAL CONSIDERATION(S) OF THE PROJECT

This study needs adolescents' students who are in Grade 9. It needs 30 native adolescents and 30 non-native adolescents who are 15 years old. Discourse completion tests will be given to the subjects to answer the questions as same as pure data.

DURATION OF PROPOSED PROJECT (please provide dates as month/year):

This study will be conducted in June, 2013. Pls tell me what the convenient time for your school schedule and students are to conduct the study.

DATE YOU WISH TO START DATA COLLECTION:

This study planned to be committed in the first week of June.

1. What are your intended methods of recruitment, data collection and analysis?

This study analyzes the written discourse of English native and non-native adolescents by comparing their requesting strategies in terms of social distance, size of imposition and power of the culturally different learners in order to enhance their interaction.

To analyze written discourse in the classrooms, DCTs will be distributed to the voluntary subjects. gender is not controlled as it does not have a significant impact on this study, while the age is controlled .

Furthermore, 60 Discourse completion tests will be distributed to 60 participants and the time given to them is 30 minutes.

2. How will you make sure that all participants understand the process in which they are to be engaged and that they provide their voluntary and informed consent? If the study involves working with children or other vulnerable groups, how have you considered their rights and protection?

In the first page of the DCT, The participant should read it carefully and if he/she agrees to participate, He/she should write the data needed and start answering. The researcher will also explain the task orally before they start answering the DCT that this DCT is not compulsory and participants have all the rights to accept or refuse filling the DCT. All the information will be confidential and for the aims of research.

3. How will you make sure that participants clearly understand their right to withdraw from the study?

The researcher will orally inform the participants before they start filling the DCT that as the human rights, all the participants are completely have the right to accept participating or refusing participating without any kind of harm.

4. Please describe how you will ensure the confidentiality and anonymity of participants. Where this is not guaranteed, please justify your approach.

First, the data will be confidential and will be only used for the research aim. You could write your name as optional but nationality should be written. The researcher will only see and analyze the data with a blind mark. The researcher will only collect all the data without showing the personal data of the participants.

5. Describe any possible detrimental effects of the study and your strategies for dealing with them.

The data, which will be collected, will be analyzed and the result (findings) will be given to the British University in Dubai and its pedagogical implications will participate in giving some advice to the teachers, students and the school principals.

6. How will you ensure the safe and appropriate storage and handling of data?

As the data is confidential, no names of the participants will be shown and no one else will see the personal data of the participants. All the data will be kept with the researcher.

7. If during the course of the research you are made aware of harmful or illegal behavior, how do you intend to handle disclosure or nondisclosure of such information (you may wish to refer to the BERA Revised Ethical Guidelines for Educational Research, 2004; paragraphs 27 & 28, p.8 for more information about this issue)?

N/A

8. If the research design demands some degree of subterfuge or undisclosed research activity, how have you justified this?

N/A

9. How do you intend to disseminate your research findings to participants?

The findings will be sent to the schools principals without mentioning the personal data of any participants and it is recommended to give them back to the participants to be aware of the issue and develop their pragmatic competence. It should also be given to the schools teachers. All of that should be done under the supervision of BUID.