The Receptive and Productive Knowledge of Request by English Foreign Language Learners at Kufa University

Abstract

Requests are important acts of spoken language. The learners' appropriate use of such acts can be attributed to the fact that they have acquired enough knowledge. However, a big number of learners do not reflect the desired ability in the use of such acts. Hence, present study aims at: (1) specifying different strategies of requests used by college learners of English, (2) highlighting the areas that college learners find a difficulty in producing and receipting requests, and (3) assessing college learners' use of this speech act, and whether or not there is any transfer from the learners' first language to the language they are learning. To bring about such aims, the study hypothesizes that Iraqi learners learning English as a foreign language in general are not good enough at receipting and producing English requests. Second, their performance on the recognition level is better than on the production level, as far as request is concerned.  Third, they have insufficient number of request strategies which causes them to repeat the same pattern for any given situation.

To test the validity of these hypotheses, the following procedures are adopted: (1) a theoretical framework of speech act theory as well as of politeness principle and some other relevant issues to request are presented, (2) A diagnostic test of two parts, namely, Recognition Test and Production Test, is administered to (75) learners at Kufa University, College of Arts/ Department of English. (3) Some statistical calculations have been made to support and/or   reject the hypotheses. Finally, relevant conclusions and pedagogical implications are drawn