ALRJournal. 2019; 3(4): 15-23 | DOI: 10.14744/alrj.2019.50479

An Investigation into Iranian High School Students’ Use of Request Speech Acts

Vahid Panahzadeh¹, Bita Asadi^2
1English Language and Literature Department, Allameh Tabataba’i University, Tehran, Iran
²Department of English, Malard Branch, Islamic Azad University, Malard, Iran

The recent advances in technology and increased opportunity for second language (L2) learners to communicate with native speakers make learning pragmatic competence and principles of appropriate language use indispensable to successful language acquisition. In view of the aforesaid fact, the present study set out to explore the most frequent strategy used by Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners regarding the speech act of request and examine the effectiveness of the Iranian mainstream high school textbooks in developing pragmatic competence and language appropriacy. The target population of the study comprised a total of 142 male and female high school students. To tap the data relevant to the learners’ pragmatic competence, a Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT) was devised for the speech act of request. It’s worth noting that while the original version of WDCT was in English, it was translated into Persian in order to come up with more illustrative and dependable results. The validity of the both versions were checked before their administrations. The findings of the study revealed that though the females proved to be better users of indirect strategies than males, the majority of individuals had problem making appropriate requests in terms of the social status and power of the interlocutors.

Keywords: Appropriacy, Iranian high school students, Pragmatic competence, Request speech act

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