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Linguistic and cultural features of requests: Some implications for teaching and learning english as a foreign language

This paper presents some linguistic and cultural features of English requests. It focuses on their structural properties of requests and communicative strategies in use, and on the analysis of the use of requests by native speakers of English and by Vietnamese EFL learners. | JOURNAL OF SCIENCE, Hue University, Vol. 70, No 1 (2012) pp. 71-85 LINGUISTIC AND CULTURAL FEATURES OF REQUESTS: SOME IMPLICATIONS FOR TEACHING AND LEARNING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE VoThi Lien Huong College of Foreign Languages, Hue University Abstract. This paper presents some linguistic and cultural features of English requests. It focuses on their structural properties of requests and communicative strategies in use, and on the analysis of the use of requests by native speakers of English and by Vietnamese EFL learners. The purpose of this article is to raise the EFL learners’ linguistic awareness and pragmatic competence in their use of English. Accordingly, the author makes suggestions for EFL teaching and learning for communicative purposes. 1. Introduction When native speakers of a particular language participate in conversational interactions, it is taken for granted that they will follow some sets of rules of communication that are socially accepted in their community. These sets of rules help speakers express themselves and hearers interpret in order to respond properly to the intended meanings encoded in the speakers’ utterances. According to Geis (1995: 141) there is conventionalization of linguistic forms for certain functions and purposes in conversations. These conventions of language use have been discussed in Pragmatics such as presupposition, implicature, Grice’s cooperative principle (1957) and the theory of speech acts of Austin (1962) and Searle (1969). Requests are one type of the linguistic speech act, which according to BlumKulka et al. (1989: ix) is “rich in both linguistic repertories and the social meanings attaching to their use”. Requests – acts in which the speaker asks for something - are used frequently in everyday interactions and constitutes an indispensable part of one’s command of a language, especially in learning a target language. In Vietnam, English has long been considered as an important subject in high schools and