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Midad AL-Adab Refereed Quarterly Journal

Midad AL-Adab Refereed Quarterly Journal

Abstract

Inter-language pragmatics, which is concerned with how non-native speakers use and perform L2, has gained more attention among pragmatic researchers in recent years. Request acts are an important event in our daily life; asking someone to do something for you provides an opportunity to enhance social relationships. However, performing requests can differ from one culture to another; each culture naturally involves different views of what is considered a polite request. Based on this hypothesis, making a request can reflect the socio-cultural values of a certain community.

Accordingly, this study investigates the pragmatic competence of Turkish and Iraqi undergraduate students and examines what cultural variables could affect the production and perception of requests in English as being performed by two culturally different learners of English namely the Iraqi and Turkish EFL learners.

In order to carry out this research, the researcher applied the coding scheme for the questionnaire developed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1984) which addressed undergraduate students of Iraqi and Turkish universities. The results show, both quantitatively and qualitatively, that the Iraqi and Turkish EFL learners showed a high pragmatic competence; also, more similarities than differences have been found between Iraqi and Turkish students request acts due to some factors including religion and the geographical location of Turkey and Iraq.

Keywords: Inter-language, Speech acts, Request, Culture

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