Turkish instructors’ beliefs and EFL learners’ realization of speech act of requests: A descriptive case study
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Abstract
Although learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) receive language education according to the principles of the communicative approach, they lack pragmatics knowledge. As one of the main issues of pragmatics, speech act of requests has been investigated in the current study. More specifically, EFL instructors' beliefs about teaching requests have been examined as well as learners' realization of speech act of requests. The study was conducted with 20 students and six instructors at an English preparatory program of a state university in Türkiye. Students' data were collected through a Discourse Completion Task while instructors were interviewed. The results suggest that Turkish EFL learners commonly use conventionally direct strategies for making requests and their requests do not show pragma-linguistic diversity. Furthermore, the rank of imposition and social distance seems to be disregarded while making requests. Also based on the interviews with EFL instructors, it was found that they do not have adequate knowledge of teaching pragmatics, and thus, their classroom practices in speech acts of requests are limited. Therefore, this study implies the importance of teaching pragmatics to students at English preparatory programs and the need for enhancing instructors’ knowledge of teaching pragmatics.
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