Iraqi Postgraduates' Perception And Production Of Requests In English : A Pragmatic Study
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Date
2011-02
Authors
Abdul Sattar, Hiba Qusay
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Abstract
The speech act of requesting by Iraqi postgraduates is selected as the unit of analysis because requests often call for strategies of indirection; requests are face-threatening, and the possibility of offending someone is inherent in the act itself (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Some studies have been conducted on native speakers of Arabic concerned with speech act in general and requests in particular. However, within the Iraqi context, there is no single empirical study that has looked at the specific speech act of requesting by Iraqis in English. Hence, this study fills an existing gap in pragmatic research by looking at Iraqis’ pragmatic ability when perceiving and producing the speech act of requesting. This study investigates the two primary aspects of pragmatic competence: perception (sociopragmatic ability) and production (pragmalinguistic ability) of requests by Iraqi postgraduates. Accordingly, it examines Iraqi postgraduate students’ perception of contextual factors such as power, distance, imposition, obligation and right that govern the realizations of requests at Universiti Saina Malaysia. The study also investigates the linguistic realisation of request speech acts in English by Iraqi postgraduate students. The corpus consists of responses to a discourse completion test (DCT) that contains eight situations, a multiple choice questionnaire (MCQ), a rating scale and a discourse evaluation test (DET). The informants were 50 Iraqi Arabic native speakers studying at Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia. The corpus was analyzed both qualitatively based on the coding scheme developed under Cross-cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) by Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989) and quantitatively (using descriptive and statistical analysis).
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Keywords
Iraqi postgraduates' perception , production of requests in English