Recent Studies on Requests across Cultures

Recent studies have investigated requests produced by L1 speakers and L2 speakers. Some of these involved L1 speakers of the inner circle of Englishes while other focussed on languages other than English. Request studies in the inner circle of Englishes involved the comparison of speakers of Irish English and English English (Barron, 2008), British English and Australian English (Merrison, Wilson, Davies, & Haugh, 2012), and British English (Zinken, 2015; Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2013). Economidou-Kogetsidis (2013) examined British English native speakers’ request strategies using different data collection methods. The participants in studies using naturally occurring data were 100 telephone callers who were native speakers of British English, while the participants for a written discourse completion task (WDCT) were 86 British English native speakers who were UK university students. The findings showed that conventional indirect strategies were used more in natural requests than those doing the WDCT. The callers mainly used the query preparatory. The natural data also showed that a greater number of strong hints were used particularly to ask for information than those using the WDCT. The callers in natural interaction felt that it was necessary for them to be polite. The natural data also showed a greater variety of syntactic markers and a mixture of syntactic downgraders. Please was frequently used in the WDCT data, while the downtoner just was preferred in the natural data. The natural data showed a preference for using the hearer’s perspective while the speaker’s perspective was employed a greater number of times in the WDCT data.

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Merrison et al. (2012) compared the e-mail requests from undergraduate students to academic staff in Britain and Australia. The corpus was 190 e-mails consisting of 264 requests for action, information, and affirmation. The results showed that the preferred strategy was conventional indirect requests. The British students viewed their relationship with the academics in an institutional hierarchy that was expressed in their use of professional titles. They humbled themselves and ennobled the academic faculty. The also constructed their role as students who could not effectively direct themselves. The Australian students perceived the relationship as social peers showing that Australians are more egalitarian and this was expressed in the use of geniality such as closeness, well-wishing, and seeking personal common ground. They constructed their identity as professionals, inside or outside the institutional context.

Barron (2008) focused her study on requests used in Irish English and English English. She examined the head acts as well as the internal and external modifiers. Twenty- seven Irish English and 27 English English speakers were involved in her study. A DCT was utilised to gather the data. The coding scheme from CCSARP (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989) was used to classify the data. The results showed that variability in the use of head acts was not found in both Irish English and English English. Both groups preferred query preparatory strategies, even though there were differences in the choice of lexical items. The Irish English were found to be more indirect and used more syntactic mitigators than the English English. It was found that both groups preferred to use the politeness marker please. Grounders were the preferred external modifiers used. The English English used pre-grounder mitigators extensively to soften the force of their requests. The Irish English seemed to be more indirect in the head acts than the English English. But, the English English extensively employed external modifiers in their requests. These studies showed that the L1 speakers of English prefer the conventionally indirect strategies, a greater variety of syntactic markers, a mixture of syntactic downgraders, and used grounders as their preferred external modifiers.

Recent studies of L1 requests in languages other than English address how L1 speakers produce requests in their own language. Such studies involved languages, such as Polish (Ogiermann, 2015), Greek (Georgalidou, 2008), Japanese (Takada & Endo, 2015), Burmese (Rattanapitak, 2013), Korean (Rue, Zhang, & Shin, 2007),

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Mandarin Chinese and Korean (Rue & Zhang, 2008), Minangkabaunese, a heritage language of Indonesia (Revita, Wijana, & Poedjosoedarmo, 2007), Cantonese and English (Lee, 2005), British English and Mandarin Chinese (Xiuping, 2012). Revita et al. (2007) investigated requests by L1 speakers of Minangkabaunese. The utterances of the Minangkabaunese were recorded or noted and the data were classified based on their functions and situations. The results showed that the indirect strategies were frequently used to make requests. Direct strategies were also employed to make requests when the interlocutors were younger and had the same status as the speaker or were of lower status than the speakers.

Georgalidou (2008) investigated Greek children’s preference for the formation of

directive speech acts. She found that Greek children were quite direct and imposing

when they addressed the other children. However, conventional politeness markers were employed when the teacher was the addressee. So, they were counteracted by strategies that integrate a degree of indirectness that showed that the children were concerned with the parameters of adult culture. Ogiermann (2015) focused on indirectness/directness in Polish children’s requests. The data were 24 self-video recordings made by Polish families. Data that were analysed using CA concepts consisted of 156 requests for objects. The focus was children’s strategies during mealtimes. The findings showed that the children used different kinds of request forms of which 26 were categorised as direct in politeness terms. They were: ‘want statements’, imperatives, simple performatives, simple interrogatives, interrogatives with modal verbs, and hints. The ‘want statements’ were used when the child showed their interest in the food offered. They were mostly produced by younger children while the older children used conventionally indirect requests with modal verbs and hedged performatives. The hints were employed by the children when the required object was not available. The use of conventionally indirect requests was not for face- saving purposes but exhibited good manners. These three studies on requests in languages other than English show that L1 speakers preferred query preparatory strategies to requests for actions and direct questions in requests for information, young children used direct strategies, while older children preferred conventional indirect strategies.

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Research on requests produced by L2 speakers have commonly addressed the L2 production of requests in comparison to those produced by the L1 speakers. For example, Nguyen and Basturkmen (2013) investigated request strategies by L2 speakers of Vietnamese using role-plays, Jalilifar (2009) examined request strategies of Iranian learners of English and L1 speakers of Australian English, Hassall (2012) investigated request strategies by Australian learners of Bahasa Indonesia, Chen (2015) taught e-mail requests to Chinese students of English, Lin (2009) compared the use of query preparatory modals in conventionally indirect requests of L1 Chinese speakers and Chinese L2 speakers of English, Lee (2011) examined request strategies of Cantonese learners of English, while Rahman and Zuhair (2015) investigated request mitigators produced by Omani learners of English and L1 speakers of English collected using a DCT. A study involving Malay L2 speakers of English was conducted by Khalib and Tayeh (2014). They investigated indirectness in English requests of Malay university students. This study involved 40 graduate and postgraduate students from two institutions. A DCT was employed to gather the data. The findings showed that conventionally indirect strategies were the preferred strategies in any situation, and non-conventionally indirect ones were never employed by the participants. The use of conventional indirects may be influenced by the typical way of requesting in Malay that starts with the phrase boleh tak (may I). Thus, there was a direct translation in the way of requesting from Malay to English.

Requests of Senegalese speakers of French were the attention of Johns and Félix- Brasdefer’s (2015) study. They examined the production of requests among Senegalese speakers of French in Dakar. This study involved 20 university students in Dakar and 20 adult French speakers from some universities in France. An oral DCT was used to gather the French-French requests and a written DCT was employed to collect the data from the Senegalese French speakers. The investigation was concerned with the head acts and the internal modification of requests. The findings showed that both groups preferred using conventional indirect strategies. In the internal modifiers, it was revealed that the French-French group preferred conditional ones, and used two or more internal modifiers, while the Senegalese group preferred the polite marker

please and infrequently used two or more internal modifiers. Both groups modified

their requests in hierarchical relationship to express distance and respect. However, the French-French group employed internal modifiers in the majority of their requests.

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Besides, they used T/V with clear distinction, while the Senegalese group used both T and V in the solidarity politeness scenario.

Those studies on requests speech acts above have been operationalized with different variables: (i) inner circle Englishes, (ii) L1 or L2 speakers (iii) linguistic construction to reveal (in)directness and mitigators, (iv) the instrument used to gather the data, (v) the social status of participants, and (vi) the context. These studies provide insights concerning (i) the role of cultural values/backgrounds (ii) the varieties of linguistic devices used, (iii) the occurrence of pragmatic transfer, (iv) the relationship between proficiency levels and (in)directness, and (v) the relationship between the instrument/s used and the findings. Besides, of the studies above, most of them employed DCT, some used role-play, a very small number used both role-play and naturally-occurring data. None of the studies above addressed pragmatic features in the same data to reveal the politeness strategies used in intercultural interactions in an Australian context involving two ethnic groups from Indonesia, Javanese and Minangkabaunese.

The present study examined request speech acts in thesis supervision sessions which is one type of institutional encounter that is mandatory in higher degree research students’ academic life. In this case, the supervision sessions were not designed for observation; they were authentic settings. Thus, the supervision sessions conducted in Javanese, Minangkabaunese, and in English were able to be observed to investigate how the speakers engaged in communication in an authentic academic setting to examine the politeness strategies employed by them. Request speech acts became the focal interest of this study because requests frequently characterise the communication occurring in thesis supervision sessions. Other studies on requests in thesis supervision sessions have not yet been conducted. However, there has been a similar study focusing on directives and commissives (suggestions and rejections) in advising sessions undertaken by Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford (1993). Their study examined the acquisition of pragmatic competence of advanced adult L2 speakers of English in the use of suggestions and rejections in advising sessions. The data of L2 speakers of English were taken by taping natural interaction in advising sessions and comparing them to those produced by L1 speakers of English. The subjects of the study involved six language backgrounds: Arabic (1), Catalan/Spanish bilingual (1), Chinese (2), Indonesian (1), Korean (4), and Japanese (1). The focus was to investigate the

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pragmatic competence change of graduate students who were L2 speakers of English. There was no comparison made between the subjects’ language background and the subjects’ L2 production to examine their politeness strategies. The present study examined pragmatic features involving backchannels, other-repetitions, overlaps, address terms, and request speech acts. These pragmatic features were examined to reveal the politeness strategies not only in English as a foreign language, but also in Javanese and Minangkabaunese as the L1. So, this study not only scrutinised the politeness strategies in the interaction in Javanese and Minangkabaunese, but also in their English production when they communicated in English with their supervisors who were L1 speakers of English in supervision sessions.

As discussed in the previous paragraph, speech acts are usually at the heart of any politeness research. This study concentrates on request speech acts and other pragmatic features and investigates the politeness strategies used in intercultural communication. Politeness theory was utilised to examine the data of this study and is described in Section 2.5.