(2010) NS & NNS Students' Requests To Faculty For An Extension

‘I just need more time’: A study of native
and non-native students’ requests to faculty

for an extension
HELEN WOODFIELD and MARIA ECONOMIDOU-KOGETSIDIS
Abstract
This paper examines the status-unequal requests of 89 advanced mixed-L1
learners and 87 British English native speakers elicited by a written dis-
course completion task. Significant differences were observed in all three
dimensions analysed: internal and external modification, and perspective.
The data demonstrate learners’ overuse of zero marking in internal modifi-
cation and overuse of preparators in supportive moves. External modifica-
tion patterns also differed qualitatively in learners’ provision of detailed
content and in native speakers’ employment of interpersonal orientation
moves. Native speakers used significantly more requests employing imper-
sonal perspective and in association with a range of mitigating, elliptical
and formulaic devices. In this paper, we explore these quantitative & quali-
tative differences in patterns of speech act behaviour and consider the im-
plications for learner development.
Keywords: interlanguage requests, modification, Greek learners
1. Introduction
In the field of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) there is now a substantial
body of empirical studies which document how learners and native
speakers differ with regard to speech act production (Blum-Kulka et al.
1989; Trosborg 1995; Hill 1997; Hassall 2001). Indeed it has been ob-
served (Bardovi-Harlig 1999; Kasper & Rose 2002; Schauer 2007) that
much of the research in ILP has taken such a comparative focus. Such
research has established that while learners have access to the same range
of speech act realisation strategies, or conventions of means (Clark 1979;
Kasper & Rose 1999) as native speakers,1 learners have been found to
differ from native speakers irrespective of proficiency level (Kasper &
Rose 1999: 86) in the conventions of form, choice of speech acts, seman-
tic formulas and content (Bardovi-Harlig 1999, 2001).
Multilingua 29 (2010), 77⫺118 01678507/2010/029⫺0077

DOI 10.1515/mult.2010.004 쑕 Walter de Gruyter
78 Helen Woodfield and Maria Economidou-Kogetsidis
Within the range of studies investigating the pragmatic performance

of learners, investigations have employed both cross-sectional and ‘single
moment’ designs (Cook 1993; Rose 2000; Woodfield 2008a). Of these,
the former aim to investigate acquisition of pragmatic development by
comparing groups of learners at different stages of proficiency (Trosborg
1995; Hill 1997) while the latter ‘either lump all the learners together in
one group, or separate them by first language or criteria other than
chronological development’ (Cook 1993: 34). While such ‘single mo-
ment’ studies may inform us about speech act use, they indicate very
little, however, regarding learner acquisition and development.
The present study falls into this latter category and takes as its focus
the pragmalinguistic aspects of pragmatic performance. We documented
89 responses from mixed-L1 (Greek, German and Japanese) university-
level English as a second language (ESL) learners on a written discourse
completion task (WDCT) (Brown 2001), eliciting a request in a status-
unequal (student/tutor) scenario. These interlanguage requests are com-
pared with 87 responses from British English native speaker2 graduate
and undergraduate students on the same task. In order to avoid influ-
ences from other cultures living in Britain, no ethnic-minority students
were included in the study. The British students who participated came
from England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland.
The non-English participants were advanced learners of English,
studying at British universities. Their English language proficiency was
assessed and established by means of standardised test scores (i.e.
TOEFL, IELTS, GCSE English Language) as set by the English lan-
guage entry requirements policy of the universities. The participants’ re-
sponses were then analysed across three key dimensions: internal modifi-
cation, external modification and request perspective.
In terms of the methodology employed, we acknowledge the extensive
criticisms of written discourse completion tasks in the literature (Bou-
Franch & Lorenzo-Dus 2005; Golato 2003; Mey 2004), specifically in
relation to the construct validity of such tasks for examining discourse
features of pragmatic performance (Johnston et al. 1998) and we return
to these criticisms in sections 3.2 and 4.4 below. As Kasper (2008: 291)
observes, employing questionnaires in pragmatics research excludes from
study ‘precisely those pragmatic features that are specific to spoken in-
teractional discourse ⫺ any aspect related to interactional contingencies,
turn-taking, sequencing of actions, speaker⫺listener coordination, fea-
tures of speech production that may have pragmatic import, such as
hesitation, and all paralinguistic and non-verbal resources’. Among the
instruments available to researchers for examining production in prag-
matics studies, production questionnaires do not generate interactive
language samples (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford 2005: 11), and as Kasper
‘I just need more time’ 79
(2008: 294) points out, ‘DCTs and other questionnaire formats elicit in-
tuitional data rather than data on language use and behaviour’. The
focus of the present study is, however, on the nature of the pragmalingu-
istic resources employed by learners and native speakers rather than on
the nature of speech acts in interaction (Kasper 2006). We support
Kasper & Rose’s (2002) contention that ‘when carefully designed,
WDCTs provide useful information about speakers’ pragmalinguistic
knowledge of the strategies and linguistic forms by which communicative
acts can be implemented and about their sociopragmatic knowledge of
the context factors under which particular strategic and linguistic choices
are appropriate’ (Kasper & Rose 2002: 96). As a means of collecting
data on learners’ knowledge of conventions of form, WDCTs continue
to be employed in studies of interlanguage production (Economidou-
Kogetsidis 2009; Bataineh & Bataineh 2006; Dalmau & Gotor 2007).
Specifically, this study aims to build on previous comparative research
in pragmatic performance of ESL learners and native speakers in three
ways: first, by providing a detailed quantitative and qualitative examina-
tion of the internal and external modification patterns and features em-
ployed by advanced ESL learners as compared to native speakers in the
written production of English requests. Second, the investigation pres-
ents findings from an analysis of request perspective of both groups of
participants, thus adding to the few studies (Blum-Kulka & Levenston
1987; Ellis 1992, 1997) which have employed such an analysis of interlan-
guage speech act performance. Third, the study presents a brief analysis
of some of the grammatical and discourse aspects of interlanguage and
native speaker requests in the corpus, aspects which to our knowledge
have not been extensively examined in the literature to date, with the
exception of a few studies (Blum-Kulka & Levenston 1987; Eisenstein &
Bodman 1993; Hassall 2001; see also Bardovi-Harlig 1999 for a review
of studies examining the relation of grammatical and pragmatic compe-
tence).
2. Background
In this review of the literature, we will begin by surveying the evidence
regarding learners’ internal mitigation of requests in production studies
as compared to patterns of use by native speakers, taking as our focus
adult learners and those studies in which English is the target language,
although evidence from studies where other target languages have been
explored and which are relevant to our investigation will also be dis-
cussed. We will then consider the evidence regarding external modifica-
tion patterns in learners’ requesting behaviour. Finally, we will explore
the evidence from those studies which have incorporated an analysis of
learners’ use of perspective in request formulation. In this survey, evi-

dence will be drawn predominantly from cross-sectional and single mo-
ment designs (see Cook 1993; and Rose 2000 for a discussion of this
distinction) while insights from longitudinal studies will also be high-
lighted.
2.1 Internal mitigation in interlanguage requests

In recent years, a number of studies of interlanguage requests have em-
ployed cross-sectional designs in order to examine pragmatic develop-
ment in learners of English at different levels of proficiency. Together
with ‘single moment’ studies, such investigations have provided insights
regarding ESL and EFL learners’ knowledge of pragmalinguistic con-
ventions of form in speech act use as elicited through a variety of instru-
ments including written discourse completion tasks (Blum-Kulka et al.
1989; Hill 1997) and oral role plays (Trosborg 1995; Kobayashi & Rin-
nert 2003).
In one of the earliest single moment studies (Rose 2000: 32) employing
a written discourse completion task, House & Kasper (1987) compared
the request realisations of native British English speakers, native Ger-
man and Danish speakers, and German and Danish learners of English.
The qualitative analysis of internal modification of requests in this study
pointed to a preference for interrogatives, (as in ‘Could I trouble you
for a lift home?’) as a syntactic mitigation device across language groups
and situations (House & Kasper 1987: 1267). Observing the use of lexi-
cal/phrasal downgraders, House & Kasper (1987: 1274) note that the
politeness marker ‘please’3 was overrepresented in the learner requests
for both groups and that the native English group also mitigated fre-
quently with this device.
Turning to further large-scale cross-sectional studies, requests in Eng-
lish were one of the three speech acts investigated in Trosborg’s (1995)
study. The context of Trosborg’s study was the learning of English as a
foreign language by Danish secondary school, high school and university
students and the requests were elicited through role play. Data were also
collected from native speakers of Danish and English. In her analysis of
internal modification of requests for learners and native speakers, the
latter group were observed to internally modify requests more frequently
than the learner group overall and this quantitative pattern was reflected
in the analysis of both syntactic and lexical/phrasal downgraders (Tros-
borg 1995: 246). A qualitative analysis of the type of internal modifica-
tion strategies employed also pointed to differences between the English
native speaker and learner group. In the use of syntactic downgraders,
a preference for past tense forms was in evidence by the native speakers
of English while this modification device was less prominent in the

learner data (Trosborg 1995: 247). Analysis of the lexical/phrasal down-
graders in Trosborg’s (1995) study pointed to further differences between
learners and native English speakers with the latter group evidencing a
wider range of devices of this type as compared to each group of learn-
ers. In a further large-scale cross-sectional study of Japanese EFL learn-
ers at different proficiency levels, Hill (1997) found that the advanced
group, while displaying an increase in downgraders per request, still fell
short of target norms as represented in the native speaker data. An
analysis of the sub-strategies used in internal mitigation patterns in Hill’s
study indicated a move away from native speaker norms by the learner
group in the overuse of syntactic downgraders (e.g. interrogative, nega-
tion, continuous and conditional forms) as compared to the native
speaker group.
Further evidence of the nature of internal modification devices by
Japanese university level EFL learners is available through an examina-
tion of Sasaki’s (1998) study of twelve learners’ production of requests
and refusals. In this methodological comparison study, data were elicited
by role play and discourse completion tasks. In the production of re-
quests, Sasaki (1998: 471) observes that her participants ‘used fewer in-
ternal modifications than reported in other studies’ and ascribes this
finding to the participants’ level of proficiency, which may have re-
stricted a greater variety of modifications. Forms employed by the learn-
ers to internally modify their requests in both elicitation formats overall
were limited in this study to the use of conditional syntactic downgraders
(‘could’, ‘would’); the politeness marker (‘please’); understaters4 (‘a lit-
tle’) and tense. In the production questionnaires, internal modification
by tense (use of past tense for present time, e.g. ‘I wondered if you could
VP’) and aspect (e.g. ‘I was wondering if you could VP’) were altogether
absent. Sasaki proposes a lack of linguistic development in the Japanese
EFL learners in her study as an explanation of the restricted range of
internal modification strategies supplied in their English requesting be-
haviour (p. 471).
The restricted range of linguistic devices which learners of English
employ in internal modification of request production is further docu-
mented in studies of advanced Greek learners of English (Economidou-
Kogetsidis 2008) and an investigation by Otçu & Zeyrek (2006). In this
latter study, a cross-sectional design was followed. Two groups of Tur-
kish undergraduate students at low intermediate and upper intermediate
levels took part in interactive role plays in three situations while 13 na-
tive speakers of English provided a control group: data from the latter
group were collected through a discourse completion task. Two points
of interest may be noted here. First, similar to the trends outlined in
Trosborg (1995), the findings of the study point to differences between

the learner and native speaker groups in the overall frequency of internal
modifiers employed, with the native speaker group modifying more fre-
quently (Otçu & Zeyrek 2006: 9). Second, there were qualitative differ-
ences between learner and native speaker groups in the nature of the
internal modifiers used. The authors observe that ‘neither of the learner
groups [could] make use of the full range of syntactic downgraders ob-
served in the native speakers’ data’ (Otçu & Zeyrek 2006: 10), a finding
which mirrors the observations on the rather restricted use of syntactic
downgraders by the Japanese learners in Sasaki’s (1998) study and in
Woodfield’s (2006, 2007) research. For both the learner groups and the
native speaker group in Otçu and Zeyrek’s investigation, internal modifi-
ers of the lexical/phrasal variety were the most frequent forms used. Both
learner groups exhibited a preference for the politeness marker ‘please’,
a finding which corresponds to the observations on German learners of
English in House & Kasper’s (1987) study and on Danish learners of
English in Faerch & Kasper’s (1989) research. Faerch & Kasper report
an overuse of the politeness marker ‘please’ in the Danish learners’ re-
quests in English and explain this preference by ‘its double function as
illocutionary force indicator and transparent mitigator … language
learners tend to adhere to the conversational principle of clarity, choos-
ing explicit, transparent unambiguous means of expression rather than
implicit opaque and ambiguous realizations’ (Faerch & Kasper 1989:
233).
Quantitative differences in internal modification in English requests
by graduate learners and native speakers are also evident in a single
moment study by Woodfield (2004, 2008a) in which written discourse
completion tasks were combined with verbal report. The learners in this
study comprised three pairs of German and three pairs of Japanese grad-
uate students and their requests were compared with native speaker con-
trols. Two findings may be highlighted in relation to those from other
studies. First, the native speaker group modified their requests internally
more frequently than the learner groups overall, reflecting the findings
in the studies by Otçu & Zeyrek (2006) and Trosborg (1995). Secondly,
quantitative differences between the native speaker group and both the
learner groups were evident when a comparison of frequency of internal
modification by more than one modifier was made. Woodfield (2007,
2008a) observes that the native speakers internally modified their re-
quests more frequently (25.6 percent) as compared to the German ESL
learners (2.17 percent) and the Japanese ESL learners (0 percent) sug-
gesting that learners may experience difficulty in combining internal
modification devices when modifying requests internally.
The studies reviewed so far are indicative of both qualitative and

quantitative differences in the patterns of internal modification in the
production of requests by learners and native speakers of English. Has-
sall’s (2001, 2003) study of Indonesian requests by Australian adult
learners sheds further light on differences between learner and native
speaker groups in request production. In this investigation, interactive
role plays were the chosen method employed. Regarding internal modifi-
cation, the study aimed to investigate whether second language learners
‘tend to perform “bare” realizations of speech acts; that is ones devoid
of internal modifiers’ (2001: 260). Three findings from this study are of
particular interest. First, in comparing the overall frequency of internal
modification between the learner and native speaker groups, Hassall’s
study found that learners rarely used internal modifiers in comparison
to the native speaker group (2001: 263). Second, the range of internal
modifiers employed by learners was limited to two modifiers (Appealer
and Understater) (2001: 264) as compared to the native speaker group
who employed Negators, Kinship terms and other forms of internal
modifier. Third, Hassall reports how the native speaker group, unlike
the learners, were able to combine different types of internal modifier in
a ‘sizeable proportion’ of their requests (2001: 266). In this study there
was no evidence of learner requests where more than one internal modi-
fier was employed ⫺ a finding which brings Hassall to conclude that ‘it
seems to be inherently difficult for second language learners to add in-
ternal modifiers’. Such evidence of learner difficulty in double internal
modification is also reflected in the requests of the ESL learners in
Woodfield’s (2007, 2008a) study.
Turning to longitudinal investigations, Schauer’s research (2004, 2006)
sheds light on acquisitional patterns in internal modification in interlan-
guage requests. This study focused on the development of requests by
twelve German learners of English in study abroad contexts as compared
to a control group of 15 English native speakers. Data from a multime-
dia elicitation task eliciting oral data were collected at three month in-
tervals during the sojourn abroad. Findings on the development of in-
ternal modification of English requests by the German learners indicate
that certain syntactic downgraders (Appreciative Embedding ‘It would
be really nice if you could fill it in’; Tentative Embedding ‘I wondered if
I can pop into your office sometime’ occurred in the learner data at the
first and third data collection sessions (Schauer 2006: 151) whereas Con-
ditional Clauses (‘I would like to ask if you could complete this)5 occurred
most frequently in the first data elicitation session, suggesting that these
structures are acquired early on. In this study, two internal modification
devices, Tag Questions and Negation were not used by the learners on
any of the three occasions. However, certain lexical downgraders such
as the politeness marker (‘please’) and Downtoner6 (‘perhaps’) displayed

high frequencies in the learner data during the first stage of data collec-
tion suggesting that these had already been acquired by this group of
learners. In a study focusing on the acquisition of Spanish requests by
native speakers of U.S. English (Félix-Brasdefer 2007), advanced learn-
ers employed conditional forms more frequently than intermediate learn-
ers: these forms, however, were absent in the requests of the beginners
who relied more heavily on the marker ‘please’ than the intermediate
and advanced groups (Félix-Brasdefer 2007: 271).
Overall, the research on internal modification in interlanguage re-
questing behaviour as compared to native use indicates a number of
trends. First, learners appear to make less frequent use of internal modi-
fication overall as compared to native speaker controls (Hassall 2001;
House & Kasper 1987; Trosborg 1995; Otçu & Zeyreck 2006). Second,
evidence suggests that learners may have difficulty in combining internal
modifiers in request production (Hassall 2001; Woodfield 2008a; Eco-
nomidou-Kogetsidis 2009). Third, there are indications that learners op-
erate with a limited range of mitigating devices (Sasaki 1998; Woodfield
2008a; Hassall 2001) as compared to native speakers. In terms of acquisi-
tion, there is evidence from developmental studies that certain syntactic
downgraders may take time to acquire (Schauer 2004; Barron 2003),
and that even at advanced levels these may fall short of target language
frequencies (Trosborg 1995: 247).
2.2 External modification

Research in interlanguage requests has also explored patterns in the use
of supportive moves by learners as compared to native speaker control
groups. Mitigating supportive moves may take the form of linguistic
strategies in which the speaker gives reasons, explanations or justifica-
tions for their request (Grounders) which may operate both as negative
politeness strategies conveying an intention by the speaker not to im-
pose, or positive politeness strategies by assuming the hearer’s coopera-
tion (Hassall 2001: 266). A range of linguistic devices for externally
modifying requests have been documented (CCSARP 1989: 287; Tros-
borg 1995: 267), including most recently those identified by Schauer
(2007: 2002). Schauer extends Trosborg’s (1995) taxonomy by three
modification moves: first, those utterances at the beginning of the re-
quest aimed at establishing a positive atmosphere (‘Small talk’), second,
those utterances at the end of the request aimed at positive reinforcement
of the speech act (Appreciator) and finally indicators of consideration of
the interlocutor’s situation (Considerator).
There is growing evidence from several studies to support the notion

that the Grounder appears as the most frequent supportive move in
interlanguage requests (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain 1986; Faerch & Kasper
1989; Hassall 2001; Woodfield 2004; Schauer 2007) and in native English
requests (House & Kasper 1987; Trosborg 1995). In his detailed study of
interlanguage request modification, Hassall (2001: 266) reports that the
Australian learners of Indonesian in his study used Grounders ‘quite
consistently across the 11 request situations’ and used a similar number
of such moves as the native group while Schauer (2007: 208) notes that
the Grounder may constitute a core element of request utterances sup-
porting Faerch & Kasper’s earlier contention that the ‘grounder stands
out as the most single most frequent supportive move’ (Faerch & Kasper
1989: 239).
Non-native effects, however, have been identified in external modifica-
tion in interlanguage request behaviour. First, in support of findings in
previous studies employing written elicitation methods (Blum-Kulka &
Olshtain 1986; House & Kasper 1987; Faerch & Kasper 1989; Blum-
Kulka 1991), Hassall (2001) observes the use of over-explicit moves in
learners’ external modification patterns in the oral role-play data in his
investigation of Australian learners’ requests in Indonesian. Hassall
notes the incorporation of written cue-card information in the learners’
oral requests as a possible cause of this phenomenon (Hassall 2001: 275)
while noting that this cue-card effect in oral roleplays may not be as
dramatic as the effects exerted by written elicitation instruments (as in
the CCSARP). Excessive use of external modification moves has been
observed by Edmondson & House (1991: 274) who identify the ‘waffle’
phenomenon as a ‘direct consequence of learners’ over-use of external
modification or supportive moves’. Reasons for such over-suppliance
have been identified as stemming both from instrument-related effects,
(as noted above) as well as from learners’ concern for propositional ex-
plicitness (Kasper 1989: 54) or in the need for compensation strategies
by learners who do not have access to standard routines (Edmondson &
House 1991). In addition to the over-suppliance of external modification
moves in some studies as noted above, non-native effects were also iden-
tified at the discourse level in Hassall’s (2001) study (Hassall 2001: 270)
in learners’ use of explicit discourse linkers to ‘clarify the logical relation
between Grounder and head act’ and in the ‘repeated, overt use of the
first person pronoun’ (Hassall 2001: 270) which native speakers might
avoid through the use of ellipsis. Overall it seems that in relation to
external modification, both instrument-related and learner-related fea-
tures may play a part.
2.3 Request perspective

It seems that few studies in the interlanguage and cross-cultural prag-
matics literature to date have presented analyses of perspective in the
requesting behaviour of learners and native speakers of the target lan-
guage, with the exception of a few. Blum-Kulka (1991: 266) observes
that ‘choice of request perspective is another source of variation for
manipulating the request’s degree of coercive force. Choice of perspec-
tive is one of the ways in which the native speaker signals his or her
estimate of the degree of coerciveness required situationally’. Avoiding
naming the hearer as the performer of the requested act as in the choice
of speaker perspective, may minimise the imposition (Blum-Kulka &
Levenston 1987: 158) while choice of joint perspective may serve to en-
code a sense of commonality and solidarity between interlocutors. Two
studies to date which have included request perspective in the analysis
are Blum-Kulka & Levenston’s (1987) quantitative and qualitative
analysis of request perspective in learner and native speakers of Hebrew
and English and Ellis’ (1992, 1997) classroom study of the development
of request perspective in two young beginner learners of English. Re-
garding Blum-Kulka & Levenston’s study, two findings are worth high-
lighting. First, in relation to the request strategies by native speakers and
learners of Hebrew there was little evidence of joint perspective across
the five situations studied, a finding reflected in Ellis’ (1992, 1997) study.
Second with regard to the Israeli learners of English, an overgeneralisa-
tion of superordinate terms (give /have) was identified in contrast to the
native speakers who only used the verbs lend with hearer perspective and
borrow with speaker perspective (Blum-Kulka & Levenston 1987: 162).
Ellis’ study of two young beginner learners’ requests in a formal context
of learning found that the hearer perspective dominated throughout the
elicitation period (four terms) reflecting the preponderance of mood-
derivable requests in the data although the speaker perspective became
more evident in the data as the learners acquired query preparatory and
want statements (Ellis 1997: 186).
3. Method
3.1 Research participants
Two participant groups comprising a total of 187 students took part in
the present study. These were 95 ESL learners and 92 British English
native speaker students of undergraduate and postgraduate study in UK
higher education institutions. A decision was made to include the re-
sponses of both postgraduate and undergraduate students in the study,
not only in order to increase the sample number, but also because this
variable was not expected to affect the linguistic choices made by the
participants.
The learner group had an advanced English language proficiency and
were engaged in a range of fields of study. Their English language profi-
ciency was assessed and established by means of standardised test scores
as set by the English language entry requirements policy of their univer-
sity. Thus the students selected for the study had either a TOEFL score
of minimum 550 (paper based), an IELTS7 score of 6.0, or a GCSE
or IGCSE English Language score of minimum of C. The use of such
standardised tests for determining the proficiency levels of learners helps
enhance the generalisability of research results as ‘the content of stan-
dardized tests is available for public scrutiny, and their validity is subject
to ongoing investigation’ (Thomas 1994: 324).
Eighty-three of the ESL learners were native speakers of Greek. The
remaining twelve learners taking part in the study comprised three pairs
of Japanese and three pairs of German learners who completed the task
in pairs. The data elicited from these twelve learners formed part of an
earlier study (Woodfield 2004) in which a form of paired verbal report
was employed in order to investigate the planning processes in written
request production. The written responses to the task from this earlier
study were included in order to extend the size of the corpus in the
present study. Thus a total of 89 ESL learner responses were documented
and analysed. These participants had spent an average of 19.1 months
in the target language community and their age ranged from 17 to 38.
In order to achieve greater homogeneity, gender was controlled. An al-
most equal number of male and female subjects participated in the study.
The British sample came from various parts of Britain and they were
all registered as permanent residents in the UK. It is important to note
that of the 92 British English native speaker sample, six of the students
completed the tasks in pairs. Thus a total of 89 native speaker responses
were documented. Of these 89, there were two occasions where a request
was not produced, thus leaving 87 responses for the analysis of internal
and external modification. A further four responses were unavailable for
analysis of perspective as these responses were propositionally incom-
plete. The native speaker participants’ age ranged from 17 to 46 and
they were also engaged in a range of fields of study. As the UK is a
multicultural society, ethnicity was controlled in relation to the native
speaker population. Thus, in order to avoid influences from other cul-
tures and languages, no ethnic-minority students were included in the
study. Subsequently, the British participants came from England, Wales,
Scotland and Ireland (see also Stewart 2006: 116 for a discussion of
‘British English’). Completed questionnaires from respondents who re-
ported to have lived in a foreign country for more than one year were
rejected. Similarly, responses from subjects who reported themselves as

being native speakers of an additional language other than English were
also eliminated. An almost equal number of male and female subjects
participated in the study.
Engaging university students as participants in empirical research has
the advantage of ensuring homogeneity as far as age, educational back-
ground, social background and cultural background are concerned. Nev-
ertheless, caution is needed not to generalise from a group of students
to the full range of an overall population.
3.2 Instrument and procedure

A written discourse completion task (WDCT) was the main elicitation
instrument of the study but interview and verbal report data, which are
beyond the scope of this paper, were also collected. The discourse com-
pletion task was designed to elicit requests in writing. Subjects were
given a short description of the status-unequal (student/tutor) scenario,
which specified the setting, the familiarity and the social power between
the participants and were then asked to complete the dialogue, respond-
ing as they thought the person in the situation would, thus providing a
requesting strategy in English. Through the use of the elicitation instru-
ment, a total number of 176 requests were collected, coded and analysed.
Even though the WDCT was the main elicitation instrument used for
the most extensive research project on speech acts today (the CCSARP;
Blum-Kulka & Olshtain 1984; Blum-Kulka et al. 1989), and numerous
cross-cultural and interlanguage studies have been conducted since then
using this instrument (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain 1986; Faerch & Kasper
1989; Fukushima 1990; Takahashi 1992, Van Mulken 1996; Lee 2005,
Woodfield 2006; Economidou-Kogetsidis 2008, 2009), the WDCT has
been subjected to a good deal of methodological scrutiny with the em-
phasis being on comparing the WDCT data to authentic discourse or
data collected by other means (e.g. multiple choice, role-plays, etc.). Sev-
eral methodological comparison studies to date highlight differences in
speech act data elicited from learners according to whether written or
oral instruments are employed (Hartford & Bardovi-Harlig 1992; Rin-
tell & Mitchell 1989; Sasaki 1998). Golato (2003: 91⫺92), for example,
suggests that WDCTs are inappropriate for studying actual language as
they require participants not to conversationally interact but to ‘articu-
late what they believe would be situationally appropriate responses
within possible, yet imaginary, interactional settings’. Woodfield (2005,
2008b) similarly reports on negative comments from research partici-
pants regarding both the authenticity of the research tasks and the reli-
ability of written responses. Thus, while WDCTs do not offer interactive
language samples, they may offer data of high comparability due to the
controlled nature of the task (Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford 2005: 11).
Yet, while acknowledging its limitations, the WDCT remains an effec-
tive method to collect speech act data from a large sample of subjects
on a wide range of difficult-to-observe linguistic phenomena (Billmyer &
Varghese 2000: 518). The findings of the present study should not be
regarded as findings deriving from actual discourse, but rather as find-
ings relating to what speakers tend to view as being pragmatically appro-
priate linguistic behaviour.
3.3 Data coding and analysis

Each of the elicited requests was analysed and coded with regard to
internal modification (both lexical/phrasal downgraders and syntactic
downgraders), external modification (external mitigating supportive
moves added to the head act), and request perspective. The percentage
frequencies of this analysis were calculated and statistical testing was
conducted in order to establish whether the percentage differences which
emerged were statistically significant. More specifically, Chi-square tests
of Independence, being suitable for nominal data, were used for the sta-
tistical analyses.
3.3.1 Data coding: The classification schemes

According to Blum-Kulka (1989: 60), internal modifiers are ‘elements
within the request utterance proper (linked to the head act), the presence
of which is not essential for the utterance to be potentially understood
as a request’. They may act either as downgraders, meant to soften the
request or as upgraders, meant to intensify the coerciveness of a request.
Two basic types can be distinguished regarding internal downgraders:
syntactic downgraders, such as interrogative, conditional, negative struc-
tures and aspect markings, and lexical/phrasal downgraders, comprising
a large number of mitigating devices. The present paper focuses on in-
ternal downgraders whose function is to soften the force of the request.
Upgraders are beyond the scope of this study. The classification adopted
here for coding the modification of the collected requests was based on
Blum-Kulka et al. (1989), Blum-Kulka & Olshtain (1984) and Edmond-
son (1981). A similar classification was employed by numerous interlan-
guage and cross-cultural studies (Achiba 2003; Barron 2006; Blum-
Kulka 1985; Blum-Kulka & Levenston 1987; Hassall 2001; Schauer
2004; Trosborg 1995; Van Mulken 1996). The data classification schemes
for lexical/phrasal downgraders and for syntactic downgraders are pre-
sented schematically in Tables 1 and 2 below:
Table 1. Internal modification: The classification scheme ⫺ lexical/phrasal downgraders.
Name Definition Devices
Marker ‘please’. ‘An optional element added to ‘please’
a request to bid for cooperative
behavior’ (Blum-Kulka et al.
1989: 283).
Consultative ‘expressions by means of which ‘would you mind’, ‘do you

devices the speaker seeks to involve the think’, ‘would it be all right
hearer directly bidding for if’, ‘is it/would it be possible’,
cooperation’ (Blum-Kulka et ‘do you think I could…’,
al. 1989: 283). ‘is it all right?’
Downtoners ‘modifiers which are used by a ‘possibly’, ‘perhaps’, ‘just’,

speaker in order to modulate ‘rather’, ‘maybe’
the impact his or her request is
likely to have on the hearer’
(Blum-Kulka et al. 1989: 284).
Understaters/ ‘adverbial modifiers by means ‘a bit’, ‘a little’, ‘sort of’,

Hedges of which the speaker under- ‘a kind of”
represents the state of affairs
denoted in the proposition’
(Blum-Kulka et al. 1989: 283).
Subjectivisers ‘elements in which the speaker ‘I’m afraid’, ‘I wonder’,

explicitly expresses his or her ‘I think/suppose’
subjective opinion vis-à-vis the
state of affairs referred to in
the proposition, thus lowering
the assertive force of the
request’ (Blum-Kulka et al.
1989: 284).
Cajolers ‘conventionalized, addressee- ‘You know’, ‘You see …’

oriented modifiers whose
function is to make things
clearer for the addressee and
invite him/her to meta-
phorically participate in the
speech act’ (Sifianou 1992: 180).
Appealers Addressee-oriented elements ‘Clean the table dear, will

occurring in a syntactically you? ………….. ok/ right?’).
final position. They may signal
turn-availability and ‘are used
by the speaker whenever he or
she wishes to appeal to his or
her hearer’s benevolent
understanding’ (Blum-Kulka
et al. 1989: 285).
Table 2. Internal modification: The classification scheme ⫺ syntactic downgraders.
Name Example
Conditional structures ‘Could you give me an extension for a few days?’
Conditional clause ‘… if it’s possible to have an extension for the
assignment.’
Tense1 ‘Is it all right if I asked for an extension?’
Aspect2 ‘I was wondering if it’s possible to have an extension for
the assignment.’
Interrogative3 ‘Will you do the cooking tonight?’
Negation of preparatory ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of an extension?’
condition
1
According to Blum-Kulka et al. (1989: 283), past tense forms are coded as down-
graders only if they are used with present time reference and can therefore be substi-
tuted by present tense forms without changing the semantic meaning of the utter-
ance.
2
Also according to Blum-Kulka et al. (1989: 282), the durative aspect marker counts
as a mitigator only if it can be substituted by a simple form (e.g. ‘I’m wondering’
vs. ‘I wonder’).
3
Preparatory request strategies of the form ‘can you/could you’ are not treated as
syntactic downgraders and therefore not included in this category (Blum-Kulka et
al. 1989), since the interrogative in these cases is unmarked.
Unlike internal modification, external modification does not affect the

utterance used for realising the act, but rather the context in which it is
embedded, and thus indirectly modifies the illocutionary force. This type
of modification takes place in the form of supportive moves occurring
either before or after the head act. As with internal modification, exter-
nal modification might serve to either soften or emphasise the force of
the whole request. The present study examined those external modifiers
whose function is to soften the request through the use of mitigating
supportive moves.
The classification followed here is based on the classification adopted
by the CCSARP project (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain 1984; Blum-Kulka
et al. 1989) and a number of other scholars (Blum-Kulka 1985; Blum-
Kulka & Levenston 1987; Trosborg 1995; Van Mulken 1996; Barron
2006; Schauer 2007), with a number of additions and modifications
as deemed necessary by the collected data. The data classification
scheme for external modification is presented schematically in Table 3
below:
Table 3. External modification: The classification scheme ⫺ supportive moves.
Name Definition Example
Grounder a clause which can either ‘I would like an assignment
precede or follow a request extension because I could
and allows the speaker to not deal the typing time.’
give reasons, explanations,
or justifications for his or
her request
Disarmer a phrase with which ‘the ‘I know that this assignment
speaker tries to remove any is important but could you
potential objections the …..?’
hearer might raise upon
being confronted with the
request’ (Blum-Kulka et al.
1989: 287)
Preparator The speaker prepares the ‘I really need a favour ….’
hearer for the ensuing
request.
Getting a precommitment The speaker checks on a ‘Could you do me a
potential refusal before favour?’.
performing the request by
trying to get the hearer to
commit.
Promise The speaker makes a ‘Could you give me an
promise to be fulfilled extension? I promise I’ll
upon completion of the have it ready by tomorrow.’.
requested act.
Imposition minimiser ‘the speaker tries to reduce ‘I would like to ask for an
the imposition placed on extension. Just for a few
the hearer by his request’ days.’
(Blum-Kulka et al. 1989:
288).
Apology The speaker apologises for ‘I’m very sorry but I need
posing the request and/or an extension on this
for the imposition incurred. project.’
Discourse Orientation opening discourse moves ‘You know the seminar
move which serve an orientation paper I’m supposed to be
function but do not giving on the 29th ….’
necessarily mitigate or
aggravate the request in
any way
Regarding the perspective of the request, a request can be realised from

the viewpoint of the Hearer, the Speaker, or both participants. A further
option also exists where any explicit mentioning of the agents is (deliber-
ately) avoided (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989: 278). In cases of embedded
structures, the coding is related to the verb in the Head Act. The coding
of the request perspective therefore took the following form:
Hearer dominance: ‘I cannot submit my coursework on time. Can you

give me an extension?’
Speaker dominance: ‘Hi, I would like an assignment extension because I
could not deal the typing time.’
Joint perspective: ‘I’ve got a problem. I’m not going to be able to give
the seminar paper on Tuesday. Could we make it the
following week?’
Impersonal: ‘You know I couldn’t normally ask but I’m snowed
under at the moment. Is there any chance for an ex-
tension?’
4. Results and discussion

In the presentation of results, the illustrative examples will be drawn
more extensively from the Greek learner participants as this group
formed the majority of learners taking part in the study.
4.1 Internal modification

Tables 4 and 5 summarise the quantitative analysis of internal modifica-
tion of requests through lexical/phrasal and syntactic downgraders. Sig-
nificant differences between the learner and native speaker participants
were evident in three areas: (i) learner over-use of zero marking in syn-
tactic and lexical/phrasal internal modification, (ii) learner under-use of
the politeness marker please, the consultative device and the cajoler and
(iii) learner underuse of the syntactic downgrader ‘tense’. We will deal
with each of these significant differences in turn:
Table 4. Internal modification: lexical /phrasal downgraders.

Zero Marker Consulative Down- Understaters/ Subjecti- Cajolers Appealers
marking please devices toners Hedges visers
Learners 34/89 15/89 22/89 6/89 6/89 3/89 0/89 3/89
38.2 % 16.9 % 24.71 % 6.74 % 6.74 % 3.37 % 0% 3.37 %
Native 17/87 30/87 38/87 4/87 8/87 8/87 4/87 2/872.29 %
speakers 19.54 % 4.48 % 43.67 % 4.59 % 9.19 % 9.19 % 4.59 %
Chi- x2⫽7.445 x2⫽7.184 x2⫽7.038 x2⫽0.377 x2⫽0.362 x2⫽2.547 x2⫽4.187 x2⫽0.183
square df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1
test p⫽0.006** p⫽0.007** p⫽0.008** p⫽0.539 p⫽0.548 p⫽0.110 p⫽0.041* p⫽0.669
results NS NS NS NS
*p significant at a p w 0.05
**p significant at a p w 0.01
Table 5. Internal modification: syntactic downgraders.
Zero Conditional Conditional Tense Aspect Interroga- Negation of
marking Structures Clause tive prep. condition
Learners 57/89 13/89 14/89 15/89 2/89 0/89 0/89
64.04 % 14.60 % 15.73 % 16.85 % 2.24 % 0% 0%
English 43/87 17/87 10/87 27/87 7/87 0/87 1/87
native 49.42 % 19.54 % 11.49 % 31.03 % 8.04 % 0% 1.14 %
speakers
Chi-square x2⫽3.833 x2⫽0.757 x2⫽0.670 x2⫽4.869 x2⫽3.049 N/A x2⫽1.029
test results df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1
p⫽0.050* p⫽0.384 p⫽0.413 p⫽0.027* p⫽0.081 p⫽0.310
First, in comparing the overall use of lexical/phrasal and syntactic de-

vices for downgrading their requests, the learners overused zero marking
by failing to internally modify their requests as compared to native
speakers. The first two examples below illustrate such zero marking for
downgraders in the learner data while (3) and (4) demonstrate the use
of lexical/phrasal downgrading (consultative device) and syntactic down-
grading (tense, conditional clause) respectively in the native speaker
data.
(1) Hello. It’s great need. I had serious personal problems and I need to
take extension for the assignment of your lesson. (Greek learner)
(2) I cannot submit my coursework on time. Can you give me an exten-
sion? (German learner)
(3) I could do my seminar next … but I want to do a good job, so would
it be possible to postpone it until …? (NS)
(4) I’m really sorry but I’m having real trouble with my assignment and
I wondered whether I could have an extension. (NS)
The findings relating to the learners’ overuse of zero marking through

lexical/phrasal downgraders as compared to native speakers is consistent
with findings from other studies. Trosborg (1995: 256) identified an un-
deruse of lexical/phrasal downgraders in her study in the oral requests
of Danish learners of English at all three educational levels as compared
to the native speaker participants. Similarly, Otçu & Zeyrek (2006: 9)
observed lower frequencies of lexical/phrasal and syntactic modification
in lower intermediate and upper intermediate Turkish undergraduate
learners as compared to English native speakers on interactive role-
plays, with higher frequencies evident for both types of downgraders in
the more proficient group suggesting possible development in this area.
Further studies investigating ESL learners’ use of internal modifiers on

written elicitation tasks (House & Kasper 1987; Hill 1997; Woodfield
2007; Economidou-Kogetsidis 2008, 2009) have also supplied evidence
that intermediate and advanced learners internally modify their requests
less frequently than native speakers overall in request production while
Hassall (2001: 263) observes that the Australian learners of Indonesian
in his study ‘rarely use internal modifiers’. These findings are not cor-
roborated in all studies, however, and Faerch & Kasper (1989) report
higher frequencies of syntactic and lexical/phrasal internal modification
by Danish learners of English as compared to native speakers in all three
of the situations analysed.
In explaining the patterns of zero marking in internal modification in
our learner data, it is interesting to note Bardovi-Harlig’s (1999) obser-
vation concerning the degree of linguistic competence which is presup-
posed in downgraders:
In play-downs [past tense, progressive, modals, negation, interroga-

tive] a speaker draws on knowledge of modals, tense and aspect, and
on syntactic knowledge of negation and question formation. With
hedges and understaters a speaker must have enough syntax to prop-
erly position them in the sentence. With consultative devices and
scopestaters a learner needs knowledge of the complements that par-
ticular formulas take and with agent avoiders, the learner needs to
know formation and use of passive. (1999: 690⫺691)
In addition to the linguistic competence required in internal modifica-

tion, appeals may be made to the extra processing effort required to add
complex structures to bare head acts as Trosborg observes (1995: 428⫺
429). The learners in the present study were, however, engaged in written
requests and therefore had time to plan their utterances and draw on
their existing pragmalinguistic repertoire. Despite this ‘reduced proc-
essing task’ (Hassall 2001: 271) and, in the case of the Japanese and
German learners, the scaffolded support available through paired in-
teraction (Storch 1998), the learners in this study evidently had difficulty
in modifying their requests internally overall. With regard to the finding
concerning significant differences in zero marking of syntactic down-
graders between the learner and native speaker groups, it is possible that
the learners were not so extensively aware of the mitigating function of
syntactic downgraders: as Faerch & Kasper (1989: 237) observe: ‘the
mitigating function of syntactic downgraders is not inherent in the gram-
matical meaning of syntactic structures: it is a pragmatic, “acquired”
meaning that derives from the interaction of the structure with its
context and requires … extra inferencing capacity on the part of the ad-
dressee’.
Here we turn to the second finding regarding internal modification,
learners’ underuse of the marker ‘please’, the consultative device and the
cajoler. Regarding this marker, our findings do not corroborate those of
several previous studies (Otçu & Zeyrek 2006; House & Kasper 1987;
Faerch & Kasper 1989; Barron 2003) and thus require explanation and
comment. It was noted above that Faerch & Kasper (1989: 232⫺233)
identify a learner preference for this lexical marker in their study, ex-
plaining this finding through learner preference for clarity and unambig-
uous means of expression. In the present study, the majority of learners
were of Greek origin and thus it is possible that language transfer was
at play. The Greek marker parakalo is employed more commonly with
direct strategies such as imperative requests (e.g. ‘Please look after the
kids for a few hours’), elliptical sentence structures (e.g. ‘Steak and chips
please!’), direct questions (e.g. ‘Where’s the post office please?’) and want
statements (‘Please, I wanted to book a ticket to England’ ⫺ transl. from
Greek) (Economidou-Kogetsidis 2005, 2008, 2009) in contrast with the
use of ‘please’ in English, which is commonly used both intrasentially
and extrasentially with conventionally indirect requests (‘Can/could you
do P’). Two examples (5) and (6) from the Greek learners’ requests il-
lustrate this usage:
(5) Excuse me sir, could you give me an extension because something

happened and I would like only two days please.
(6) I have a very serious health problem and I would like a week’s exten-
sion for my assignment please.
Turning to the findings regarding the consultative device as an internal

modifier, our results regarding learners’ underuse of this marker are in
keeping with Trosborg (1995: 260), who notes infrequent use in the re-
quests of the learner and native speaker groups in her study. Consulta-
tive devices are a means by which ‘a speaker seeks to involve the hearer
directly bidding for cooperation’ (Blum-Kulka et al 1989: 283). There is
evidence from research into learners in study abroad contexts to suggest
that such devices may already form part of the interlanguage of German
learners of English at the start of their sojourn (Schauer 2004: 266).
In explaining this learner underuse of consultative devices in the pres-
ent study, appeals may be made to Brown & Levinson’s (1978, 1987)
positive and negative politeness distinction. Even though Brown &
Levinson’s (1978, 1987) conceptualisation of politeness as the realisation
of face-threat mitigation and as a universal aspect of language usage has
come under considerable criticism in the 1990s (e.g. Matsumoto 1989;

Ide 1989; Watts et al. [1992] 2005), and in recent years (e.g. Kasper 2006;
Locher 2004; Mills 2003; Spencer-Oatey 2000; Watts 2003, 2005; Watts
et al. 2005) (for an extensive discussion on this see Watts 2005), their
distinction between positive and negative politeness seems to offer a
valid explanation of our results here. Without making claims that this
positive/negative politeness distinction can safely be applied to all cul-
tures (and research findings have indeed shown that it cannot), it seems
to be able to explain some of the differences in the politeness orientations
of the Greek and British culture. Whereas the Greeks have been found to
emphasise solidarity, informality and in-group relations (Economidou-
Kogetsidis 2003, 2005, 2008; Pavlidou 1994, 1997, 1998; Sifianou 1992,
2001 [1989]) ⫺ the characteristics of positive politeness ⫺ it has been
suggested in some studies that the British value individuality, tact, indi-
rectness and avoiding impositions (Economidou-Kogetsidis 2003, 2004,
2005, 2008; Fukushima 2000; Placencia 1992; Scollon & Scollon 1983;
Wierzbicka 2003 [1991]). Structures such as the consultative device
(‘would you mind’, ‘do you think’, ‘would it be all right if’, ‘is it/would
it be possible’, ‘do you think I could …’, ‘is it all right?’) can be seen
as functioning as negative politeness devices whose role is to minimise
impositions and imply social distance between interactants (Economi-
dou-Kogetsidis 2008: 127; Sifianou 1992).
Similar to the findings regarding consultative devices, the learners’ use
of cajolers was significantly underused in the learner data as compared
to the native speakers. Such devices are essentially addressee-oriented
and function in an interpersonal way to involve the interlocutor directly
in the speech act. Elsewhere in ILP research, the findings have not been
conclusive: Trosborg (1995: 263) observes that interpersonal markers
were used infrequently by learners at all levels in her study, while Otçu &
Zeyrek (2006: 9) report a regressive pattern in the use of cajolers with
the upper-intermediate learners demonstrating a move away from native
speaker patterns. In the present study, there were no cases where learners
employed the use of this device and in the absence of further empirical
evidence we hypothesise that such interpersonal markers may be sensi-
tive to the elicitation instrument and thus more in evidence in studies
examining speech acts in interaction although the findings from Tros-
borg (1995) suggest that this may not be the case. Two examples from
the native speaker data in our study appear below as illustration:
(7) You know that I work hard, but please can I have an extension this
once? (NS)
(8) I’m struggling to meet the deadline for this assignment. Could you
grant me an extension please? You know I wouldn’t ask normally
unless I had a good reason. (NS)
The final part of this discussion on internal modification patterns turns

to the learners’ significant underuse of tense as a syntactic modification
device in the present study. Our results are seen to support several ILP
studies which observe the absence of marking for tense in syntactic modi-
fication of requests (Sasaki 1998; Woodfield 2006, 2007) or under-use of
such marking (Trosborg 1995: 246) in relation to native speakers. In
explaining this finding, we have observed the lack of transparency in the
mitigating function of past tense structures for learners for whom such
pragmalinguistic devices may take time to acquire. In support of this
explanation, appeals may be made to Andersen and Shirai’s (1996) hy-
pothesis concerning the acquisitional sequence for simple past. Accord-
ing to this sequence the pragmatic function of simple past as a ‘softener’
may be the final function to be acquired (cited in Bardovi-Harlig (1999:
695). In addition there is evidence to suggest a disassociation of past
tense forms with nonpast contexts in some learners (Bardovi-Harlig
1999: 696). To the extent that this may be the case, it is possible that the
learners in our study had not developed their form⫺function networks
to a robust level such that they were confident in using past tense forms
as present time mitigating devices.
4.2 External modification

Table 6 below summarises the quantitative analysis of external modifica-
tion of requests through supportive moves. Statistically significant differ-
ences between the learner and native speaker participants were evident
in three areas: (i) learner over-use of preparators, (ii) learner underuse
of imposition minimisers, and (iii) learner underuse of an apology for
posing the request and/or for the imposition incurred.
Apart from the significant differences revealed, results also confirmed
that the grounder is perhaps the most frequent supportive move, not
only in native English requests but also in interlanguage requests, a find-
ing which agrees with the evidence from several interlanguage studies
(Blum-Kulka & Olshtain 1986; Faerch & Kasper 1989; Hassall 2001;
Woodfield 2004; Félix-Brasdefer 2007; Schauer 2007 ⫺ see section 2
above). The extensive reliance of the speakers on the grounder is not
unexpected as this external modifier, which provides reasons and expla-
nation for the request being made, is a very basic constituent of the
requesting act (Schauer 2007).
Table 6. External Modification: Supportive moves.
Zero Grounder Disarmer Preparator Getting Promise Imposition Apology Discourse
marking a precom- minimiser Orienta-
mitment tion move
Learners 19/89 64/89 4/89 8/89 0/89 0/89 4/89 4/89 0/89
21.34 % 71.91 % 4.49 % 8.98 % 0% 0% 4.49 % 4.49 % 0%
English 19/87 60/87 7/87 2/87 0/87 0/87 0/87 12/87 1/87
native 21.83 % 68.96 % 8.04 % 2.29 % 0% 0% 0% 13.79 % 1.14 %
speakers
Chi- x2⫽0.006 x2⫽0.183 x2⫽0.947 x2⫽3.674 N/A N/A x2⫽4.001 x2⫽4.603 x2⫽1.029
square df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1
test p⫽0.937 p⫽0.669 p⫽0.330 p⫽0.055** p⫽0.045* p⫽0.032* p⫽0.494
results NS NS NS NS
This result also seems to point towards the fact that the grounder is
acquired by learners quite early on, probably due to the fact that offering
explanations and/or justifications for the request does not require knowl-
edge of idiomatic (i.e. native-like) use and simply involves the construc-
tion of a new, often syntactically simple clause. Hassall (2001: 274) also
argues that external modifiers in general tend to be syntactically less
demanding and pragmalinguistically less complex, as ‘the addition of
supportive moves will not generally result in more complex pragmalingu-
istic structures to be planned’. In Schauer’s findings (2007: 204), the
grounder is also among the first external modifiers to be used by all the
learners in the initial data collection session shortly after the learners
had arrived in the target environment. This result also seems to support
the argument that the grounder is acquired by learners relatively early
on, something which might explain its widespread use.
Although no statistically significant differences were revealed between
the learners and the native speakers as far as the frequency of the
grounder is concerned, a closer examination of the data collected reveals
interesting qualitative differences regarding the content of the grounder
offered. Bardovi-Harlig (2001) notes that content is one of the ways in
which NSs and NNSs may differ in their contribution, and a number of
studies (Takahashi & Beebe 1987; Beebe et al. 1990) have found that
even in cases where the two ‘use the same semantic formulas, the content
that they encode may be strikingly different’ (Bardovi-Harlig 2001: 18).
In the present study, our data interestingly reveal that while the native
speakers generally employed rather vague explanations and reasons, the
learners went into much greater detail by providing specific reasons
and explanations, primarily concerning matters of poor health, family
emergencies and so on. Reference to the value of honesty was also made
on the part of some learners (examples [11] and [12]).
The examples below illustrate the contrast:
(9) Excuse me would it be possible for me to have an extension for my

assignment. I just need more time. (NS)
(10) Hello, how are you? The reason I’m here is that I really need a
small extension on the project as I have been working full-time and
I’m really pressured on both sides. I feel that I will get ill one of these
days. (Greek learner)
(11) Mr Clark, I’m desperate. I need an extension for my assignment.
Can you help me to solve this problem? I’d like to be honest with
you but last night I was drunk. (Greek learner)
Unlike the use of the grounder, which did not involve statistically signifi-
cant differences between the learners and the native speakers, significant
differences were evident in the use of preparators and imposition mini-
misers (see Table 6). More specifically, the learner group significantly
overused these devices by preparing the hearer for the ensuing request
(see example [12]) and by trying to reduce the imposition placed on the
hearer by their request (see example [13]):
(12) Hello. I would like to be honest with you [preparator]. So I am asking

you an extension for my assignment, if possible … because my com-
puter has broken down and I am unable to hand in my assignment
on time. (Greek learner)
(13) Hello Mr … I would like to ask for an extension. Just for a few
days [imposition minimiser] because I had a problem and I need
just a few days more [imposition minimiser] please. (Greek learner)
The learners’ over-reliance on such supportive moves may also find its
roots in their lack of confidence resulting from their non-native linguistic
proficiency (Economidou-Kogesidis 2009) and their social role as over-
seas students (Pellegrino 2005). House & Kasper (1987) also comment
on ‘the insecure social status associated with the foreigner role’ as being
a reason why learners employ more supportive moves’ (1987: 1285). This
might be particularly important in the academic encounter examined as
the status balance needs to be maintained and students must perform a
request to a higher status interlocutor. Bardovi-Harlig & Hartford
(1993), when examining the acquisition of pragmatic competence in aca-
demic advising sessions noted how nonnative speaker students differed
from native speakers in their ability to employ appropriate speech acts
and negotiate successfully. This over-reliance on preparators and imposi-
tion minimisers on the part of the learners might therefore serve as a
form of compensation for their lack of confidence both as speakers and

as university students.
Unlike the fact that the learners overused these devices, this was not
the case with the use of an apology. The learners were found to signifi-
cantly underuse the apology as a supportive move for their requests. As
the majority of the learner participants of the study were Greek native
speakers, this result might be the result of pragmalinguistic transfer.
While in English overt expressions of apologies and thanks are widely
used and are in line with the society’s emphasis on individuality and tact
(Scollon & Scollon 1983; Sifianou 1992, 2001 [1989]; Wierzbicka 2003
[1991]; Economidou-Kogetsidis 2003, 2004, 2005) (i.e. the negative as-
pect of face) (Brown & Levinson 1978, 1987), in Greek, where emphasis
is on the positive aspect of face (Brown & Levinson 1978, 1987) (i.e. on
involvement, spontaneity and often directness) (Sifianou 1992, 2001
[1989]; Pavlidou 1994, 1997, 1998; Makri-Tsilipakou 2001; Economidou-
Kogetsidis 2003, 2005, 2008), such overt apologies are often seen as un-
necessary or reserved for what they consider to be very serious offences
(Economidou-Kogetsidis 2008).
4.2.1 Orientation moves: management of shared knowledge

In this section we report on one discoursal aspect of the native speaker
requests which we feel is worthy of note. In establishing our taxonomy
for external modification, we identified a discourse move, which seems
to be neutral with regard to mitigation and which we identify as an
‘orientation move’. Further examples of such orientation moves in native
speaker requests are identified in Woodfield (2007a). In our corpus we
identified only one such instance in the native speaker data ([14] below),
and no instances in the learner corpus. This move occurs in sentence-
initial position, and seems to function interpersonally in several ways:
(14) You know the seminar paper I’m supposed to be giving on the 29 th ⫺
I’m having a bit of trouble getting it finished ‘cos I’ve just started
a new teaching job and I can’t find the time to get the reading done
at the moment. I was wondering if there’s any chance of changing
the date? Would that be OK?
The orientation move in this native speaker’s request functions not only
to establish the focus of the request but also operates at an interpersonal
level, serving to establish the extent of shared knowledge between the
speaker and hearer and in doing so, decreasing the sense of social dis-
tance and increasing a sense of solidarity and involvement in the dis-
course. In a sense, such moves function in a similar way to ‘Heads’
identified in the discourse of spoken grammar (Carter & McCarthy 1995,

1997) providing an ‘interactive space in which [speakers] can highlight a
topic in such a way as to provide an orientation to their listeners for
what will follow’ (Carter & McCarthy 1995: 210). We are unaware of any
evidence concerning such moves in pragmatics studies to date employing
discourse completion tasks, but the use of ‘interpersonal markers’ as
internal modification devices have been noted elsewhere. For example,
Trosborg, while observing that such markers were used infrequently by
the learners in her study, notes that ‘interpersonal markers are very im-
portant for establishing and maintaining harmony between two inter-
locutors and these markers are no doubt needed in situations in which
the requester’s face is threatened’ (1995: 263). However, the interpersonal
markers identified in Trosborg’s study are restricted to lexical/phrasal
devices (internal modification) and do not carry the orientational dis-
course function as in the external modification move identified in (14).
In explaining the infrequency of this move in our native speaker data,
it is possible that methodological and/or social effects were at play. First,
the utterance in (14) represented the final written response to the task
from one of the three pairs of native speakers (see above section 3.1).
These participants were able to rehearse their responses orally prior to
the written formulation, thus this mode of data collection (paired verbal
report) may have encouraged the use of more of an interpersonal dimen-
sion to the request formulations although such a claim would need to
be verifed empirically. Secondly, such interpersonal moves may have
been linked to these participants’ perceptions of a sense of equality with
their tutor as suggested by verbal report data accompanying such written
tasks (Woodfield 2004, 2006). The graduate students in (14) above were
mid-career professionals and such orientation moves may have been
used to encode a sense of solidarity and equality with their (hypotheti-
cal) tutor.
Such orientation moves in our study were, however, absent in the
learner corpus. Indeed, it seems that the management of shared know-
ledge in interactive requests may create a challenge for some learners.
As noted in 2.2 above, non-native effects were identified in the external
modification moves in Hassall’s study. In this investigation, Hassall
(2001: 270) observes (i) learner use of overexplicit discourse linkers ‘to
clarify the logical relation between Grounder and head act’ and (ii) the
repeated inclusion of the first person pronoun (saya ‘I/my’) throughout
the Grounder. Both these features, Hassall maintains, served to ‘convey
an impression of a lack of shared knowledge between speaker and
hearer, which in turn created a sense of increased social distance between
the interlocutors’ (emphasis added). This tendency towards such over
explicitness in the learner data through the use of first (and second)
person pronouns has also been noted in other studies (Scarcella & Bru-
nak 1981, cited in Hassall 2001: 276) and was also apparent, but not
extensive, in our corpus. Example (15) below from one of the Japanese
pairs serves to illustrate such non-native effects both in (i) the learners’
use of an explicit discourse linker (as in Hassall’s 2001 study) and (ii)
the overuse of first and second person pronouns across the request as
a whole:
(15) Could you give an extension for giving you a seminar paper because
I had tried to finish but I couldn’t. (Japanese learner)
Returning to the example in (14) above, orientation moves seem to serve

an important interpersonal function in the performance of requests, both
at a discourse level to create a sense of shared knowledge between inter-
locutors and at a social level to reduce social distance. It would be inter-
esting to note in future investigations both (i) the extent to which such
moves are a function of the elicitation method, and (ii) how such moves
in interlanguage requests develop as evidenced in longitudinal investiga-
tions.
4.3 Perspective
We observed above (section 2.3) that with the exception of a few studies
(Ellis 1992, 1997; Blum-Kulka & Levenston 1987; Félix-Brasdefer 2007),
there has been little investigation in the cross-cultural and interlanguage
pragmatics literature to date into learner and native speaker use of per-
spective in the encoding of speech acts. In the analysis of request per-
spective in such studies, four dimensions have been identified (speaker,
hearer, joint, or impersonal) according to the role emphasised in the
requestive act (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989: 19). The following examples
from our corpus serve to illustrate these four perspectives:
(16) Speaker-oriented: Hi, I would like an assignment extension because

I could not deal the typing time. (Greek ESL learner)
(17) Hearer-oriented: I cannot submit my coursework on time. Can you
give me an extension?. (Greek ESL learner)
(18) Joint: I’ve got a problem. I’m not going to be able to give the
seminar paper on Tuesday. Could we make it the following week?
(English native speaker)
(19) Impersonal: You know I couldn’t normally ask but I’m snowed un-
der at the moment. Is there any chance for an extension?
(English native speaker).
In total, 89 learner responses were analysed for perspective. In the native

speaker corpus, four responses were propositionally incomplete and two
participants did not provide a request, thus a total of 83 responses
were analysed.
The findings regarding request perspective in our corpus are summa-
rised in Table 7:
Table 7. Analysis of perspective (ENS n ⫽ 83 ESL learners n ⫽ 89).

Hearer Speaker Joint Impersonal Total
Native 7/83 62/83 1/83 13/83 83
speakers 8.43 % 74.69 % 1.20 % 15.66 % 99.98 %
Learners 21/89 67/89 0/89 1/89 89
23.59 % 75.28 % 0% 1.12 % 99.99 %
Chi-square x2⫽7.244 x2⫽0.008 x2⫽1.079 x2⫽12.142 n/a
test results df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1 df⫽1
p⫽0.007* p⫽0.930 p⫽0.299 p⫽0.000**
NS NS
First, within the learner data, there is a preference for speaker perspec-
tive overall and this pattern mirrored that employed by the native
speaker group as illustrated in (20) and (21). Speaker perspective formed
75.28 percent of the learner requests, approximating the native speaker
levels (74.69 percent): this compared to 23.59 percent of the learner re-
quests which encoded Hearer perspective. This finding is consistent with
the developmental patterns found in Ellis’ (1992, 1997) and Trosborg’s
(1995) studies. While Ellis (1997: 186) notes that most requests in the
young learners in his classroom investigation emphasised the role of the
hearer, ‘reflecting a preponderance of mood-derivable utterances in the
data’, the speaker perspective became more strongly evident ‘as learners
acquire other types of requests (i.e. query preparatory, and want state-
ments)’. In her cross-sectional study, Trosborg (1995) notes a shift to
speaker-based strategies with increase in educational level. As the learn-
ers in our study were relatively advanced, consisting of undergraduate
and graduate students, they had already developed a range of forms for
performing their requests (including query preparatory strategies, need
and want statements). Thus it is possible that developments in the learn-
ers’ overall pragmalinguistic repertoire in terms of the range of head acts
employed may partially explain the predominance of speaker perspective
in the learner data. A second explanation for this finding may stem from
the number of want and need statements as illustrated in (21) below.
Such statements formed 26.9 percent of the requests for the learners
overall (as compared to 6.02 percent of the native speaker requests) and
so speaker perspective in the learner data was more strongly associated

with want and need statements as compared to the native speaker re-
quests. Two examples from the learner data serve to illustrate the use of
speaker perspective:
(20) Excuse me but I couldn’t finish my paper yet. I need more time.
Could I continue for a while? (Japanese learner)
(21) I need an extension because I was ill and I could not do it on time.
(Greek learner)
The second finding relates to differences in learner and native speaker

frequencies of use of impersonal perspective. Here, the native speakers
made significantly greater use of impersonal perspective (15.66 percent)
as compared with the learners (1.12 percent). This pattern is mirrored in
the learners’ tendency overall (98.87 percent of requests) to employ
either Hearer perspective or Speaker perspective in their requests for an
extension. A qualitative investigation of the thirteen requests in the na-
tive speaker data coded for impersonal perspective (see example [19]
above) indicates that seven of these requests were associated with formu-
laic patterns around the lexical item ‘chance’ (exemplified in [22⫺25]
below): interestingly, such constructions were apparent in the one re-
quest in the learner corpus (26) employing impersonal perspective. In
turn, these constructions in the native speaker corpus were evident in
tandem with internal mitigation devices such as negative supposition
(22), past tense/aspect marking (23) and conditional structures (24). Fi-
nally, in the native speaker data, impersonal perspective was also associ-
ated with elliptical forms, as in (25).
Examples from the native speaker data:
(22) I haven’t started the assignment yet. I don’t suppose there’s any
chance of an extension?
(23) X, you know the seminar paper I’m supposed to be giving on the
29th ⫺ I’m having a bit of trouble getting it finished ’cos I’ve just
started a new teaching job and I can’t find the time to get the
reading done at the moment. I was wondering if there’s any chance
of changing the date?
(24) I’ve been having some difficulty completing this assignment. Would
there be a chance of an extension?
(25) I have had problems with my assignment. Any chance for an extra
couple of days to do it properly?
Example from the learner data:
(26) Is there any chance that I could get an extension before my assign-
ment?
The findings in this study regarding the low frequency of impersonal

perspective overall accord with those from Ellis’ (1992, 1997) study of
two young learners’ interlanguage requests and Rose’s (1992) method-
ologically-driven investigation of American English requests. Ellis (1997:
186) observes that ‘very few utterances encode a joint or impersonal
perspective’ noting only 3 such requests in the learner corpus during
the period of investigation. Rose, investigating adult American English
students’ responses to six WDCTs (⫹/⫺ hearer response) similarly ob-
serves few requests employing impersonal perspective overall in relation
to other perspectives (Rose 1992: 55). Of the six scenarios investigated
in Rose’s study, the analysis of perspective in the written requests for an
extension to a tutor mirrored that of the present study, with participants
preferring speaker perspective overall and using impersonal perspective
on a small proportion of their responses. These quantitative patterns are
not represented, however, in Blum-Kulka & Levenston’s (1987) study of
native speaker and learners of Hebrew and English where overrepresen-
tation of impersonal requests in the learner data was found to be linked
to processes of lexical simplification (Blum-Kulka & Levenston 1987:
160). In this latter study, where both groups used the same impersonal
perspective, they were found to differ in choice of lexical item, reflecting
a different underlying perspective (Blum-Kulka 1991).
In sum, the quantitative analysis of perspective in the corpus of re-
quests in the present study found significant differences between the
learner and native speakers in the frequency of requests encoding imper-
sonal perspective with the native speakers employing more extensive use
of these constructions and in association with a range of mitigating,
elliptical, and formulaic devices. Second, both groups displayed a prefer-
ence for Speaker perspective overall. Third, significant differences were
evident in the use of Hearer perspective reflecting the more extensive
use of impersonal perspective in the native speaker data. Finally joint
perspective was evident in only one token in the corpus overall.
4.4 Limitations of the study

Turning to the limitations of the study, we would highlight three points.
First, the data in the present study were collected through a written
discourse completion task which, as we acknowledge above (3.2), has
been extensively criticised in the interlanguage pragmatics literature. As
a non-interactive instrument (Félix-Brasdefer 2008a) which yields lan-

guage samples which are ‘neither interactive, nor consequential’ (Bar-
dovi-Harlig & Hartford 2005: 11), the DCT is limited in scope to a tool
for accessing pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge. We are
aware of the move in pragmatics research towards capturing more au-
thentic, interactive data (Cohen 2004, 2007; Kasper 2008) but at the
same time maintain that the participant responses provided in the pres-
ent study do provide insights into learners’ pragmalinguistic knowledge.
Secondly, we have not considered the impact of length of stay on speech
act performance (Matsumura 2001; DuFon & Churchill 2006): in the
present study the length of stay of the learners in the host environment
varied from 6 months to 4 years and possible effects of this factor on
learner variation in production should be acknowledged. Thirdly, the
learner participant profile was limited to undergraduate and post gradu-
ate students and thus the findings may not be generalisable to other
social groups.
4.5 Implications for learner development

The findings of this study strongly suggest that even at advanced levels
of proficiency and in a study abroad context, ESL learners’ pragmatic
performance may reveal important pragmatic deviations from that of
native speakers. This seems to agree with a number of studies which
found that ‘advanced learners make only modest progress in pragmatics
even over long sojourns’ (Barron 2006; Hoffman-Hicks 2000; Regan
1995, cited in Hassall 2006: 32) and that ‘advanced learners remain non-
native in even quite basic pragmatic knowledge and aspects of pragmatic
performance after a sojourn of one year’s length or more’ (Hassall
2006: 32).
These pragmatic deviations on the part of the non-native speakers can
have serious implications for the learners when interacting with speakers
of the target language. ESL learners, by virtue of living in the target
environment (e.g. as university students), have an increased need for
successful interaction, and at university, interacting with academic staff
is an important communicative task for students. Yet the learners may
not only fail to accomplish their communicative goals, but their devia-
tions from the target language can lead both to pragmalinguistic and
sociopragmatic failure (Thomas 1983). Interlanguage requestive devia-
tion might violate social appropriateness in the target language in many
important dimensions, therefore causing important social misunder-
standings.
More specifically, such deviations on the type and amount of internal
and external request modification, may have a distorting effect on the
pragmatic force of the utterance. The underuse of the marker please

or that of an apology, for example, particularly in power-asymmetrical
situations, may lead English native speakers to view such requests as
brusque and lacking respect. Over-reliance on external modifiers such as
preparators and/or imposition minimisers, on the other hand, might also
make the non-native speakers appear desperate or pushy and as failing
to show acceptance of the power asymmetry existing in the relationship.
The over-use of external modification devices can easily result in longer
utterances which are also capable of violating social norms. Blum-
Kulka & Olshtain (1986) argue that verbosity violates the quantity
maxim and might cause pragmatic failure if it creates a lack of appropri-
ateness, which might consequently make the hearer react with impa-
tience. Also, over-informativeness related to longer external modifica-
tions (i.e. elaborating the background, the preconditions, the reasons,
etc.) might cause the speaker to be judged more harshly on the maxim
of relevance as it can obscure the request which is to follow.
Unlike learners’ obvious grammatical and syntactic errors, such prag-
matic failure is rarely recognised as such by non-linguists, especially in
the case of advanced learners whose high linguistic proficiency often
leads native speakers to expect high pragmatic competence (Bardovi-
Harlig et al. 1991). The present study therefore has implications for the
learning of pragmatics by advanced learners during study abroad, espe-
cially through exposure to the informal learning environment. Hassall
(2006) refers to a case study of himself during a three-month sojourn in
Indonesia and reveals that ‘the informal learning environment can be a
powerful stimulus for the acquisition of pragmatic knowledge’ (2006: 52)
during even a short sojourn. Yet he argues that for this pragmatic know-
ledge to be shaped and re-shaped, learners’ conscious attention (inciden-
tal or intentional) to the pragmatic input available is crucial (Schmidt
1993). Indeed, although study abroad seems to offer students a large
amount of L2 input and many opportunities for output, in reality it
appears that appropriate input is not guaranteed (Barron 2006: 67). It
has been argued that a basic reason for this is learners’ lack of involve-
ment in the host culture (Churchill & DuFon 2006), even during study
abroad contexts (Barron 2006).
The findings of this study also have implications for the development
of pragmatic competence in ESL pedagogy, and thus in more formal
settings. The inclusion of pragmatics in language teaching/learning has
been supported by a number of scholars (Bardovi-Harlig et al. 1991;
Bardovi-Harlig 1992, 1996; Bouton 1996; Bardovi-Harlig & Dörnyei
1998; Kasper & Rose 2001; Rose & Kasper 2001; Crandall & Basturk-
men 2004; Woodfield 2006). More specifically, there are two pedagogical
implications concerning the results of this study: the first relates to the
inclusion of pragmatics in language teaching and teacher training, and

the second to the design and development of more pragmatics-focused
materials.
In regard to language teaching, Kasper & Rose (2001: 8) present evi-
dence that ‘instructional intervention may be facilitative to, even neces-
sary for, the acquisition of L2 pragmatic ability’. Bardovi-Harlig et al.
(1991) and Kasper (1997), observe that pragmatic awareness in the lan-
guage classroom can be facilitated by the use of data collection and
description, as such data provide the teachers with authentic materials
for observation, discussion and classroom practice. Kasper (1997: 9) also
argues that ‘it is vital that teaching materials on L2 pragmatics are re-
search-based’ thus emphasising that insights from empirical research can
facilitate understanding of the linguistic devices available in different
social situations. Kasper (1997: 9) explains that such activities may allow
learners to develop their sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic compe-
tence by helping them to ‘make connections between linguistic forms,
pragmatic functions, their occurrence in different social contexts, and
their cultural meanings’.
As far as teaching materials are concerned, the significance of pres-
enting learners with more pragmatics-focused, culture-oriented materials
is evident. Textbooks often lack a sufficient emphasis on the pragmatic
aspect of language (Bardovi-Harlig et al. 1991; Bardovi-Harlig 1992,
1996) and EFL/ESL curricula and tests often emphasise structure rather
than pragmatics. As a result, even advanced language learners ‘show a
marked imbalance between their grammatical and their pragmatic
knowledge’ (Bardovi-Harlig & Dörnyei 1998: 234). Equally, according
to Crandall & Basturkmen (2004), the conventional approach seen in
many EAP textbooks is problematic as most textbooks typically present
learners with ‘explicit realisations of speech acts rather than subtle and
indirect ones’ (2004: 39).
5. Conclusion
The present study compared the pragmalinguistic knowledge of speech
act use of advanced ESL learners and British English native speakers in
a status unequal situation and identified significant differences in in-
ternal and external modification patterns and in the formulation of per-
spective in request production. Learners were observed to overuse zero
marking in internally modifiying their requests and underuse lexical po-
liteness markers, consultative devices and cajolers as compared to the
native speaker group. In external modification, learners used signifi-
cantly fewer imposition minimisers and apologies but were observed to
overuse preparators. While both groups employed the grounder as the
most frequent external modification device, there were qualitative differ-

ences observed in the more detailed nature of these devices provided by
the learners. Native speakers were observed to use orientation moves
interpersonally to signal shared knowledge, indicate common ground
and to focus the topic of the request. The two groups also differed signif-
icantly in the native speakers’ more frequent use of impersonal perspec-
tive, which they combined with a range of internal mitigation devices,
and elided and formulaic constructions. Taken together, it is hoped that
the findings from this study will contribute to the growing body of em-
pirical data which highlight those areas of ILP where even advanced
learners may benefit from pedagogical intervention and development.
University of Bristol & University of Nicosia
Notes
1. The distinction between native speakers and non-native speakers is not a clear-cut
one and as such it has come under discussion (see for examples Davies 1991, 2003).
For the purposes of the present study, the criterion used for defining our native
speakers is ‘childhood exposure’ (i.e. native speaker by birth), rather than long
residence in the adopted country, education in the target language medium or by
being native speaker-like by being an exceptional learner (Davies 2003). The dis-
tinction between NSs and NNS/learners adopted here follows the distinction made
in a number of other recent pragmatic studies (e.g. Cohen & Shively 2007; Geluy-
kens 2008; Hassall 2001, 2003; Schauer 2004, 2007).
2. The term ‘British English native speaker’ can be a controversial one as Britain is
enriched by a vibrant multiculturalism while there is a multitude of ‘new’ and post-
colonial Englishes spoken throughout the world. Yet this term is employed in our
study in order to distinguish between speakers of American, Australian and other
varieties of English whose pragmatic performance has been found to vary. The use
of the term ‘native speakers of British English’ has been common practice in a
number of other cross-cultural pragmatics studies (e.g. in the CCSARP project by
Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper 1989; Blum-Kulka 1982; Fukushima 2000; House &
Kasper 1981, 1987; Kasper 2006; Stewart 2005; Trosborg 1995, etc.) and this prac-
tice has been followed here.
3. We also use the term ‘politeness marker’ throughout this study to refer to a form
of lexical modification following extensive use of the term in the interlanguage
pragmatics literature (Bardovi-Harlig 1999; Schauer 2006; Hendriks 2008; Barron
2008). However, we also acknowledge the limitations of this usage given the exten-
sive discussions of the discursive approach to politeness (Watts 2005: xv; Mills
2003) which emphasise the role of the hearer in evaluating the politeness of an ut-
terance.
4. Understaters such as ‘a bit’, ‘a little’, ‘sort of’, ‘a kind of’ can be defined as ‘adver-
bial modifiers by means of which the speaker underrepresents the state of affairs
denoted in the proposition’ (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989: 283).
5. Examples from Schauer (2004: 263).
6. Downtoners such as ‘possibly’, ‘perhaps’, ‘just’, ‘rather’, ‘maybe’ can be defined as
‘modifiers which are used by a speaker in order to modulate the impact his or her
request is likely to have on the hearer’ (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989: 284).
7. IELTS stands for ‘International English Language Testing System’ offered by the
British Council. It is an internationally-recognised system for testing English lan-
guage skills in listening, reading, writing and speaking, and it is designed to assess
the language ability of candidates who need to study or work where English is used
as the language of communication. IELTS is accepted for entry to every university
in the UK.
References
Achiba, Machiko. 2003. Learning to request in a second language: Child interlanguage
pragmatics. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Andersen, Roger W. & Yasuhiro Shirai. 1996. The primacy of aspect in first and sec-
ond language acquisition: The pidgin⫺creole connection. In William C. Ritchie &
Tej K. Bhatia (eds.), Handbook of second language acquisition, 527⫺570. San
Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen. 1992. Pragmatics as part of teacher education. TESOL
Journal 1. 28⫺32.
Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen. 1996. Pragmatics and language teaching: Bringing prag-
matics and pedagogy together. In Lawrence Bouton (ed.), Pragmatics and lan-
guage, 21⫺39. Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Division
of English as an International Language.
Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen. 1999. Exploring the interlanguage of interlanguage prag-
matics: A research agenda for acquisitional pragmatics. Language Learning 49.
677⫺713.
Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen. 2001. Evaluating the empirical evidence. Grounds for in-
struction in pragmatics? In Kenneth Rose & Gabriele Kasper (eds.), Pragmatics
in language teaching, 13⫺32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen & Zoltan Dörnyei. 1998. Do pragmatic learners recognize
pragmatic violations? Pragmatic versus grammatical awareness in instructed L2
learning. TESOL Quarterly 32. 233⫺259.
Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen, César Félix-Brasdefer & Alwiya S. Omar (eds.). 2006. Prag-
matics and language learning, Volume 11. Manoa, HI: University of Hawai’i Press.
Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen, Beverly Hartford, Rebecca Mahan-Taylor, Mary J. Mor-
gan & Dudley W. Reynolds. 1991. Developing pragmatic awareness: Closing the
conversation. ELT Journal 45. 4⫺15.
Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen & Beverly Hartford. 1993. Learning the rules of academic
talk: A longitudinal study of pragmatic development. Studies in Second Language
Acquisition 15. 279⫺304.
Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen & Beverly Hartford. 2005a. Institutional discourse and in-
terlanguage pragmatic research. In Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig & Beverly Hartford
(eds.), Interlanguage pragmatics: Exploring institutional talk, 7⫺36. London: Law-
rence Erlbaum.
Bardovi-Harlig, Kathleen & Beverly Hartford (eds.). 2005b. Interlanguage pragmatics:
Exploring institutional talk. London: Lawrence Erlbaum, 7⫺36.
Barron, Anne. 2003. Acquisition in interlanguage pragmatics. Learning how to do things
with words in a study abroad context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Barron, Anne. 2006. Requesting in Irish English and English English: A study of intra-
lingual regional pragmatic variation. Paper presented at the 31st International
LAUD Symposium. Intercultural Pragmatics, Linguistics, Social and Cognitive
Approaches. Landau/Pfalz, Germany.
Barron, Anne. 2008. Contrastive requests in inner circle englishes: A study in varia-
tional pragmatics. In Martin Pütz & JoAnne Neff-van Aertselaer (eds.), Developing
contrastive pragmatics: Interlanguage and cross-cultural perspectives, 355⫺402.
Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Bataineh, Ruba & Ruba Fahmi Bataineh. 2006. Apology strategies of Jordanian EFL
university students. Journal of Pragmatics 38. 1901⫺1927.
Beebe, Leslie, Tomoko Takahashi & Robin Uliss-Weltz. 1990. Pragmatic transfer in
ESL refusals. In Robin C. Scarcella, Elaine S. Anderson & Stephen D. Krashen
(eds.), Developing communicative competence in a second language, 55⫺73. New
York: Newbury House.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1982. Learning to say what you mean in a second language:
A study of the speech act performance of learners of Hebrew as a second language.
Applied Linguistics 3. 29⫺59.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1985. Modifiers as indicating devices: The case of requests.
Theoretical Linguistics 12(2/3). 213⫺229.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1989. Playing it safe: The role of conventionality in indirect-
ness. In Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Gabriele Kasper & Juliane House (eds.), Cross-
cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies, 37⫺70. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex,
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1991. Interlanguage pragmatics: The case of requests. In Rob-
ert Phillipson, Eric Kellerman, Larry Selinker, Michael Sharwood Smith & Merrill
Swain (eds.), Foreign/Second language pedagogy research: A commemorative vol-
ume for Claus Faerch, 255⫺272. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House & Gabriele Kasper (eds.). 1989. Cross-cultural
pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, N. J. Ablex.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana & Edward A. Levenston. 1987. Lexical-grammatical prag-
matic indicators. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 9(2). 155⫺170.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana & Elite Olshtain. 1984. Requests and apologies: A cross cul-
tural study of speech act realization patterns. Applied Linguistics 5. 196⫺213.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana & Elite Olshtain. 1986. Too many words: Length of utterance
and pragmatic failure. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 8. 165⫺179.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House & Gabriele Kasper (eds.). 1989. Cross-cultural
pragmatics: Requests and apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.
Billmyer, Kristine & Manka Varghese. 2000. Investigating instrument-based pragmatic
variability: Effects of enhancing discourse completion tests. Applied Linguistics 21.
517⫺552.
Brown, James D. 2001. Pragmatics tests: Different purposes, different tests. In Ken-
neth Rose & Gabriele Kasper (eds.), Pragmatics in language teaching, 301⫺326.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
Bou-Franch, Patricia & Nuria Lorenzo-Dus. 2005. Enough DCTs: Moving methodo-
logical debate in pragmatics into the 21st century. Paper presented at the 16 th
International Conference on Pragmatics and Language Learning, Indiana Univer-
sity, Bloomington.
Bouton, Lawrence. 1996a. Pragmatics and language learning. In Bouton, Larry (ed.),
Pragmatics and language learning, 1⫺20. Urbana, Ill: University of Illinois at Ur-
bana-Champaign: Division of English as an International Language
Bouton, Lawrence (ed.). 1996b. Pragmatics and language. Urbana, Ill: University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Division of English as an International Language.
Bouton, Lawrence & Yamuna Kachru (eds.), Pragmatics and language learning mono-
graph series Vol. 3. Urbana-Champaign: Division of English as an international
language, University of Illinois, Urbana-Campaign.
Boxer, Diana & Andrew D. Cohen (eds.). 2004. Studying speaking to inform second
language learning. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Brown, Penelope & Stephen Levinson. 1978. Universals in language usage: Politeness
phenomena. In Esther Goody (ed.), Questions and Politeness, 56⫺289. Cambridge,
U.K: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, Penelope & Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in language
usage. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Carter, Ronald & Michael McCarthy. 1995. Spoken grammar: What is it and how can
we teach it? English Language Teaching Journal 49. 207⫺218.
Carter, Ronald & Michael McCarthy. 1997. Exploring spoken English. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Churchill, Eton & Margaret A. DuFon. 2006. Evolving threads in study abroad re-
search. In Margaret A. DuFon & Eton Churchill (eds.), Language learners in study
abroad context, 1⫺27. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Clark, Herbert. 1979. Responding to indirect speech acts. Cognitive Psychology 11.
430⫺477.
Cook, Vivian. 1993. Linguistics and second language acquisition. London: Macmillan.
Cohen, Andrew, D. 2004. Assessing speech acts in a second language. In Diana
Boxer & Andrew D. Cohen (eds.), Studying speaking to inform second language
learning, 302⫺327. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Cohen, Andrew, D. 2007. Teaching and assessing L2 pragmatics: What can we expect
from learners? Paper presented at the American Association for Applied Linguis-
tics CA, April 2007.
Cohen, Andrew, D. & Rachel Shively. 2007. Acquisition of requests and apologies in
Spanish and French: Impact of study abroad and strategy-building intervention.
The Modern Language Journal 91(ii). 189⫺212.
Crandall, Elizabeth & Helen Basturkmen. 2004. Evaluating pragmatics-focused mate-
rials. English Language Teaching Journal 58. 38⫺49.
Dalmau, Maria S. & Hortensia Curell i Gotor. 2007. From ‘Sorry very much’ to ‘I’m
ever so sorry’: Acquisitional patterns in L2 apologies by Catalan learners of Eng-
lish. Intercultural Pragmatics 4. 287⫺315.
Davies, Alan. 1991. The native speaker in applied linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Davies, Alan. 2003. The native speaker: Myth and reality Clevedon: Multilingual
Matters.
DuFon, Margaret A. & Eton Churchill (eds.). 2006. Language learners in study abroad
context. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.
Economidou-Kogetsidis, Maria. 2003. Requesting strategies and cross-cultural prag-
matics: Greek and English. Unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Notting-
ham, Nottingham, UK.
Economidou-Kogetsidis, Maria. 2004. Requestive directness in intercultural communi-
cation: Greek and English. In Leigh James & Eric Loo (eds.), Outer limits: A
reader in communication and behaviour across cultures, 25⫺48. Melbourne: Lan-
guage Australia.
Economidou-Kogetsidis, Maria. 2005. ‘Yes, tell me please, what time is the midday
flight from Athens arriving?’: Telephone service encounters and politeness. Inter-
cultural Pragmatics 2. 253⫺273.
Economidou-Kogetsidis, Maria. 2008. Internal and external mitigation in interlan-
guage request production: The case of Greek learners of English. Journal of Polite-
ness Research: Language, Behaviour, Culture 4(1). 111⫺138.
Economidou-Kogetsidis, Maria. 2009. Interlanguage request modification: the use of
lexical/phrasal downgraders and mitigating supportive moves. Multilingua 28(1).
79⫺112.
Edmondson, Willis. 1981. Spoken discourse: A model for analysis. London: Longman.
Edmondson, Willis & Juliane House. 1991. Do learners talk too much? The waffle
phenomenon in interlanguage pragmatics. In Phillipson, Robert, Eric Kellerman,
Larry Selinker, Michael Sharwood Smith & Merrill Swain (eds.), Foreign/Second
language pedagogy research: A commemorative volume for Claus Faerch, 273⫺286.
Clevedon, England: Multilingual Matters.
Eisenstein, Muriel & Jean Bodman. 1993. Expressing gratitude in American English.
In Gabriele Kasper & Shoshana Blum-Kulka (eds.), Interlanguage pragmatics,
64⫺81. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ellis, Rod. 1992. Learning to communicate in the classroom: A study of two language
learners’ requests. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 14. 1⫺23.
Ellis, Rod. 1997a. Learning to communicate in the classroom. In Rod Ellis (ed.), SLA
research and language teaching, 173⫺195. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ellis, Rod (ed.). 1997b. SLA research and language teaching. Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press.
Faerch, Claus & Gabriele Kasper. 1989. Internal and external modification in interlan-
guage request realization. In Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Julianne House & Gabriele
Kasper (eds.), Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and apologies, 221⫺247. Nor-
wood, NJ: Ablex.
Félix-Brasdefer, J. César. 2007. Pragmatic development in the Spanish as a FL class-
room. Intercultural Pragmatics 4(2). 253⫺286.
Félix-Brasdefer, J. César. 2008a. Politeness in Mexico and the United States: A con-
trastive study of the realization and perception of refusals. Amsterdam/Phildadel-
phia: John Benjamins.
Félix-Brasdefer, J. César. 2008b. Perceptions of refusals to invitations: Exploring the
minds of foreign language learners. Language Awareness 17(3). 195⫺211.
Foster-Cohen, Susan, Michael Sharwood Smith, Antonella Sorace & Ota Mitsuhiko
(eds.). 2004. EUROSLA Yearbook, Volume 4, 253⫺273. Amsterdam: John Benja-
mins.
Freed, Barbara F. (ed.). 1995. Second language acquisition in a study abroad context.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Fukushima, Saeko. 1990. Offers and requests: Performance by Japanese learners of
English. World Englishes 9. 317⫺325.
Fukushima, Saeko. 2000. Requests and Culture: Politeness in British English and Japa-
nese. Bern: Peter Lang.
Gass, Susan, Carolyn Madden, Dennis Preston & Larry Selinker (eds.). , Variation in
second language acquisition, Volume 1. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Geluykens, Ronald. 2008. Requesting in native and non-native business letters. In
Geluykens, Ronald & Bettina Kraft (eds.), Institutional discourse in cross-cultural
contexts, 169⫺192. Munich: Lincom Studies in Pragmatics.
Golato, Andrea. 2003. Studying complement responses: A comparison of DCTs and
recordings of naturally occurring talk. Applied Linguistics 24. 90⫺121.
Hartford, Beverly & Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig. 1992. Experimental and observational
data in the study of interlanguage pragmatics. In Lawrence Bouton & Yamuna
Kachru (eds.), Pragmatics and language learning monograph series Vol. 3, 33⫺52.
Urbana-Champaign: Division of English as an international language, University
of Illinois, Urbana-Campaign.
Hassall, Tim. 2001. Modifying requests in a second language. International Review of
Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL) 39. 259⫺283.
Hassall, Tim. 2003. Requests by Australian learners of Indonesian. Journal of Prag-
matics 35. 1903⫺1928.
Hassall, Tim. 2006. Learning to take leave in social conversations: A diary study. In
Margaret A. DuFon & Eton Churchill (eds.), Language learners in study abroad
contexts, 31⫺58.Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Hendriks, Berna. 2008. Dutch English requests: A study of request performance by
Dutch learners of English. In Martin Pütz & JoAnne Neff-van Aertselaer (eds.),
Developing contrastive pragmatics: Interlanguage and cross-cultural perspectives,
335⫺354. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter,
Hickey, Leo & Miranda Stewart (eds.). 2005. Politeness in Europe, 116⫺129. Clevedon:
Multilingua Matters.
Hill, Thomas. 1997. The development of pragmatic competence in an EFL context.
Phd dissertation, Tokyo: Temple University, Japan.
Hoffman-Hicks, Sheila D. 2000. The longitudinal development of French foreign lan-
guage pragmatic competence: Evidence from study abroad. PhD dissertation, In-
diana University, 1999. Dissertation Abstracts International ⫺A 61 (2): 591.
House, Juliane & Gabriele Kasper. 1981. Politeness markers in English and German.
In Florian Coulmas (ed.), Conversational routine: Explorations in standardized
communication situations and prepatterned speech, 157⫺185. The Hague: Mouton
Publishers.
House, Juliane & Gabriele Kasper. 1987. Interlanguage pragmatics: Requesting in a
foreign language. In W. Lörscher & R. Schulze (eds.), Perspectives on language in
performance. Festschrift for Werner Hüllen on the occasion of his 60 th birthday,
1250⫺1288. Tübingen: Narr.
Ide Sachiko. 1989. Formal forms and discernment: Two neglected aspects of universals
of linguistic politeness. Multilingua 8(2/3). 223⫺248.
Kasper, Gabriele. 1989. Variation in interlanguage speech act realization. In Susan
Gass, Carolyn Madden, Dennis Preston & Larry Selinker (eds.), Variation in sec-
ond language acquisition, Volume 1, 37⫺58. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Kasper, Gabriele. 1997. Can pragmatic competence be taught? (NetWork #6) [HTML
document]. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, Second Language Teaching and
Curriculum Center. Retrieved [13/09/2006] from the World Wide Web: http://
www.nflrc.hawaii.edu/NetWorks/NW06/
Kasper, Gabriele. 2006a. Speech acts in interaction: towards discursive pragmatics. In
Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig, César Félix-Brasdefer & Alwiya S.Omar (eds.), Prag-
matics and language learning, Volume 11, 281⫺314. Manoa, HI: University of
Hawai’i Press.
Kasper, Gabriele. 2006b. Pragmatic comperehension in learner⫺native speaker dis-
course. Language Learning 34(4). 1⫺20.
Kasper, Gabriele. 2008. Data collection in pragmatics research. In Spencer-Oatey,
Helen (ed.), Culturally speaking: Culture, communication and politeness theory,
316⫺341. London: Continuum.
Kasper, Gabriele & Shoshana Blum-Kulka (eds.). 1993. Interlanguage pragmatics. Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press.
Kasper, Gabriele & Kenneth Rose. 1999. Pragmatics and SLA. Annual Review of Ap-
plied Linguistics 19. 81⫺104.
Kasper, Gabriele & Kenneth Rose. 2001. Pragmatics in language teaching. In Rose,
Kenneth & Gabriele Kasper (eds.), Pragmatics in language teaching, 1⫺9. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kasper, Gabriele & Kenneth Rose. 2002. Pragmatic development in a second language.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Kobayashi, Hiroe & Carol Rinnert. 2003. Coping with high imposition requests: High
vs. low proficiency EFL students in Japan. In Martinez Flor, Juan Uso & Fernan-
dez Guerra (eds.), Pragmatic competence and foreign language teaching, 161⫺184.
Castello: Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume 1.
Lee, Cynthia. 2005. A cross-linguistic study on the linguistic expressions of Cantonese
and English requests. Pragmatics 15. 395⫺422.
Locher, Miriam. 2004. Power and politeness in action. Disagreements in oral communi-
cation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Lörscher, W. & R. Schulze (eds.). 1987. Perspectives on language in performance. Fest-
schrift for Werner Hüllen on the occasion of his 60 th birthday. Tübingen: Narr.
Makri-Tsilipakou, Marianthi. 2001. Congratulations and bravo! In Arin Bayraktaro-
ğlu & Maria Sifianou (eds.), Linguistic politeness across boundaries: The case of
Greek and Turkish, 137⫺178. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Matsumoto, Yoshiko. 1989. Politeness and conversational universals: Observations
from Japanese. Multilingua 8(2/3). 207⫺221.
Matsumura, Shoichi. 2001. Learning the rules for offering advice: A quantitative ap-
proach to second language socialization. Language Learning 51(4). 635⫺679.
Mey, Jacob. 2004. Between culture and pragmatics: Scylla and Charybdis? The precari-
ous condition of intercultural pragmatics. Intercultural Pragmatics 1. 27⫺48.
Mills, Sara. 2003. Gender and politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Otçu, Bahar & Deniz Zeyrek. 2006. Requesting in L2: Pragmatic development of Tur-
kish learners of English. Paper presented at the 31st Intercultural Pragmatics
LAUD Symposium. Intercultural Pragmatics: Linguistic, Social and Cognitive
Approaches. Landau/Pfalz, Germany.
Pavlidou, Theodossia. 1994. Contrasting German⫺Greek politeness and the conse-
quences. Journal of Pragmatics 21. 487⫺511.
Pavlidou, Theodossia. 1997. The last five turns: Preliminary remarks on closings in
Greek and German telephone calls. International Journal of the Sociology of Lan-
guage 126. 145⫺162.
Pavlidou, Theodossia. 1998. Greek and German telephone closings: Patterns of con-
firmation and agreement. Pragmatics 8. 79⫺94.
Pellegrino, Valerie Aveni. 2005. Study abroad and second language use: Constructing
the self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Phillipson, Robert, Eric Kellerman, Larry Selinker, Michael Sharwood Smith & Mer-
rill Swain (eds.). 1991. Foreign/Second language pedagogy research: A commemora-
tive volume for Claus Faerch. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
Placencia, Maria Elena. 1992. Politeness and mediated telephone conversations in
Ecuadorian Spanish and British English. Language Learning Journal 6. 80⫺82.
Regan, Vera. 1995. The acquisition of sociolinguistic native speech norms. In Barbara
F. Freed (ed.), Second language acquisition in a study abroad context, 245⫺267.
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rintell, Ellen, M. & Candace J. Mitchell. 1989. Studies of requests and apologies: An
inquiry into method. In Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House & Gabriele Kasper
(eds.), Cross-cultural pragmatics: Requests and Apologies, 248⫺272. Norwood,
NJ: Ablex.
Ritchie, William C. & Tej K. Bhatia (eds.). 2004. Handbook of second language acquisi-
tion. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
Rose, Kenneth. 1992. Speech acts and questionnaires: The effect of hearer response.
Journal of Pragmatics 17. 49⫺62.
Rose, Kenneth. 2000. An exploratory cross-sectional study of interlanguage pragmatic
development. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 22. 27⫺67.
Rose, Kenneth & Gabriele Kasper (eds.). 2001. Pragmatics in language teaching. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sasaki, Miyuki. 1998. Investigating EFL students’ production of speech acts: A com-
parison of production questionnaires and role plays. Journal of Pragmatics 30.
457⫺484.
Scarcella, Robin & J. Brunak. 1981. On speaking politely in a second language. In-
ternational Journal of the Sociology of Language 27. 59⫺75.
Scarcella, Robin C., Elaine S. Anderson & Stephen D. Krashen (eds.). 1990. Develop-
ing communicative competence in a second language. New York: Newbury House.
Schauer, Gila A. 2004. May you speak louder maybe? Interlanguage pragmatic devel-
opment in requests. In Susan Foster-Cohen, Michael Sharwood Smith, Antonella
Sorace & Ota Mitsuhiko (eds.), EUROSLA Yearbook, Volume 4, 253⫺273. Am-
sterdam: John Benjamins.
Schauer, Gila A. 2006. The development of ESL learners’ pragmatic competence: A
longitudinal investigation of awareness and production. In Bardovi-Harlig, Kath-
leen, César Félix-Brasdefer & Alwiya S. Omar (eds.), Pragmatics and language
learning volume 11. Manoa, HI: Second Language teaching and Curriculum Center
University of Hawaii. University of Hawaii Press, 135⫺163.
Schauer, Gila A. 2007. Finding the right words in the study abroad context: The
development of German learners’ use of external modifiers in English. Intercul-
tural Pragmatics 4. 193⫺220.
Schmidt, Richard. 1993. Consciousness, learning and interlanguage pragmatics. In
Gabriele Kasper & Shoshana Blum-Kulka (eds.), Interlanguage Pragmatics, 21⫺
42. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scollon, Ron & Suzanne Wong-Scollon. 1983. Face in interethnic communication. In
Richard Janney & Richard Schmidt (eds.), Language and communication, London/
New York: Longman, 156⫺188.
Sifianou, Maria. 1992. Politeness phenomena in England and Greece. A cross-cultural
perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Sifianou, Maria. 2001 [1989]. On the telephone again! Differences in telephone behav-
ior. In Alexandra Georgakopoulou & Marianna Spanaki (eds.), A reader in Greek
sociolinguistics: Studies in modern Greek language, culture and communication,
137⫺159. Bern: Peter Lang. First published in 1989 in Language in Society 18.
527⫺544.
Spencer-Oatey, Helen (ed.). 2008. Culturally speaking: Managing rapport through talk
across cultures. 2nd edition. London: Continuum.
Stewart, Miranda. 2005. Politeness in Britain. In Leo Hickey & Miranda Stewart
(eds.), Politeness in Europe, 116⫺129. Clevedon: Multilingua Matters.
Storch, Neomy. 1998. A classroom-based study: Insights from a collaborative text
reconstruction task. ELT Journal 52(4). 291⫺300.
Takahashi, Satomi. 1992. Transferability of indirect request strategies. University of
Hawai’i. Working Papers in ESL 11. 69⫺124.
Takahashi, Satomi & Leslie Beebe. 1987. The development of pragmatic competence
by Japanese learners of English. Japan Association for Language Teaching (JALT)
Journal 8. 131⫺155.
Thomas, Jenny. 1983. Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics 4(2). 91⫺
112.
Thomas, Margaret. 1994. Assessment of L2 proficiency in second language acquisition
research. Language Learning 44. 307⫺336.
Trosborg, Anna. 1995. Interlanguage pragmatics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Van Mulken, Margot. 1996. Politeness markers in French and Dutch requests. Lan-
guage Sciences 8(3/4). 689⫺702.
Watts, Richard, Sachiko Ide & Konrad Ehlich (eds.). 2005 [1992]. Politeness in lan-
guage: Studies in its history, theory and practice. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Watts, Richard. 2005. Linguistic politeness research: quo vadis? In Richard Watts,
Sachiko Ide & Konrad Ehlich (eds.), Politeness in language: Studies in its history,
theory and practice, xi⫺x1vii. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Watts, Richard. 2003. Politeness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 2003 [1991]. Cross-cultural pragmatics: The semantics of human in-
teraction. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Woodfield, Helen. 2004. Requests in English: A study of ESL and native speakers’
responses to written discourse completion tasks. Unpublished Phd dissertation.
University of Bristol, UK.
Woodfield, Helen. 2005. Problematizing discourse completion tasks: Voices from ver-
bal report. Paper presented at the 14th World Congress of Applied Linguistics
(AILA), Madison, Wisconsin, USA.
Woodfield, Helen. 2006. Requests in English: ESL learners’ responses to written dis-
course completion tasks. Paper presented at the 31st International LAUD Sympo-
sium. Intercultural Pragmatics, Linguistics, Social and Cognitive Approaches.
Landau/Pfalz, Germany.
Woodfield, Helen. 2007. Interlanguage requests in English: Some evidence from an
empirical study. Paper presented at the Annual Conference for the American Asso-
ciation for Applied Linguistics, Costa Mesa, CA, April 21⫺24.
Woodfield, Helen. 2008a. Interlanguage requests in English: A contrastive study. In
Martin Pütz & JoAnne Neff Van Aertselaer (eds.), Contrastive pragmatics: Inter-
language and cross-cultural perspectives, 231⫺264. Berlin/New York: Mouton De
Gruyter.
Woodfield, Helen. 2008b. Problematizing discourse completion tasks: Voices from ver-
bal report. Evaluation & Research in Education 21. 43⫺69.
Helen Woodfield is a Senior Lecturer in TESOL and Applied Linguistics at the Uni-
versity of Bristol. Her research interests are in interlanguage pragmatics, pragmatic
development and cross-cultural communication. Recent publications include ‘Prob-
lematising discourse completion tasks: Voices from verbal report’ (in Evaluation and
research in education. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2008) and ‘Interlanguage re-
quests: A contrastive study’ (in Developing contrastive pragmatics: Interlanguage and
cross cultural perspectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008).
Address for correspondence: University of Bristol Graduate School of Education
35 Berkeley Square, Clifton, Bristol BS8 1JA.
e-mail: helen.woodfield@bris.ac.uk
Maria Economidou-Kogetsidis is Assistant Professor of English and Applied Lingui-

tics at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus. She holds a doctorate in cross-cultural prag-
matics from the School of English Studies of the University of Nottingham, UK.
Her research areas are cross-cultural communication, interlanguage and intercultural
pragmatics, sociopragmatics, pragmalinguistics and politeness. Her publications have
appeared in Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Politeness Research and Multilingua.
Her current research focuses on the pragmatic performance of Greek and Greek Cyp-
riot learners of English.
Address for correspondence: Department of Languages and Literature, School of Hu-
manities, Social Sciences and Law, University of Nicosia, 46 Makedonitissas Avenue,
Nicosia 1700, Cyprus.
e-mail: kogetsidis.m@unic.ac.cy

(2010) NS & NNS Students' Requests To Faculty For An Extension

Transféré par

Informations du document

Description originale:

Titre original

Copyright

Formats disponibles

Partager ce document

Partager ou intégrer le document

Options de partage

Avez-vous trouvé ce document utile ?

Ce contenu est-il inapproprié ?

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

(2010) NS & NNS Students' Requests To Faculty For An Extension

Transféré par

Droits d'auteur :

Formats disponibles

‘I just need more time’: A study of native

and non-native students’ requests to faculty

HELEN WOODFIELD and MARIA ECONOMIDOU-KOGETSIDIS

Multilingua 29 (2010), 77⫺118 01678507/2010/029⫺0077

Within the range of studies investigating the pragmatic performance

learners’ use of perspective in request formulation. In this survey, evi-

2.1 Internal mitigation in interlanguage requests

of English while this modification device was less prominent in the

Trosborg (1995), the findings of the study point to differences between

The studies reviewed so far are indicative of both qualitative and

as the politeness marker (‘please’) and Downtoner6 (‘perhaps’) displayed

2.2 External modification

There is growing evidence from several studies to support the notion

2.3 Request perspective

rejected. Similarly, responses from subjects who reported themselves as

3.2 Instrument and procedure

3.3 Data coding and analysis

3.3.1 Data coding: The classification schemes

Consultative ‘expressions by means of which ‘would you mind’, ‘do you

Downtoners ‘modifiers which are used by a ‘possibly’, ‘perhaps’, ‘just’,

Understaters/ ‘adverbial modifiers by means ‘a bit’, ‘a little’, ‘sort of’,

Subjectivisers ‘elements in which the speaker ‘I’m afraid’, ‘I wonder’,

Cajolers ‘conventionalized, addressee- ‘You know’, ‘You see …’

Appealers Addressee-oriented elements ‘Clean the table dear, will

Unlike internal modification, external modification does not affect the

Regarding the perspective of the request, a request can be realised from

Hearer dominance: ‘I cannot submit my coursework on time. Can you

4. Results and discussion

4.1 Internal modification

Table 4. Internal modification: lexical /phrasal downgraders.

First, in comparing the overall use of lexical/phrasal and syntactic de-

The findings relating to the learners’ overuse of zero marking through

Further studies investigating ESL learners’ use of internal modifiers on

In play-downs [past tense, progressive, modals, negation, interroga-

In addition to the linguistic competence required in internal modifica-

(5) Excuse me sir, could you give me an extension because something

Turning to the findings regarding the consultative device as an internal

come under considerable criticism in the 1990s (e.g. Matsumoto 1989;

The final part of this discussion on internal modification patterns turns

4.2 External modification

The examples below illustrate the contrast:

(9) Excuse me would it be possible for me to have an extension for my

(12) Hello. I would like to be honest with you [preparator]. So I am asking

form of compensation for their lack of confidence both as speakers and

4.2.1 Orientation moves: management of shared knowledge

identified in the discourse of spoken grammar (Carter & McCarthy 1995,

Returning to the example in (14) above, orientation moves seem to serve

(16) Speaker-oriented: Hi, I would like an assignment extension because

In total, 89 learner responses were analysed for perspective. In the native

Table 7. Analysis of perspective (ENS n ⫽ 83 ESL learners n ⫽ 89).

so speaker perspective in the learner data was more strongly associated

The second finding relates to differences in learner and native speaker

Examples from the native speaker data:

Example from the learner data:

The findings in this study regarding the low frequency of impersonal

4.4 Limitations of the study

a non-interactive instrument (Félix-Brasdefer 2008a) which yields lan-

4.5 Implications for learner development

pragmatic force of the utterance. The underuse of the marker please

inclusion of pragmatics in language teaching and teacher training, and

most frequent external modification device, there were qualitative differ-

University of Bristol & University of Nicosia