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Internal/External Modifiers in Request Speech Act among Iranian Study Abroad Learners

Author Affiliations

  • 1Department of studies in Linguistics, KIKS, University of Mysore, Manasagangotri, Mysore-06, INDIA
  • 2 Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Masagangotri, Mysore-570006, INDIA

Res. J. Recent Sci., Volume 3, Issue (5), Pages 55-64, May,2 (2014)

Abstract

Request as the most frequent speech act in communication, has been investigated enough in inter language pragmatics and cross-cultural studies. However, most of these investigations were cross-sectional studies. The present longitudinal study aimed to focus on the learners’ use of internal and external modifiers among Iranian study abroaders. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) on request was administered to a group of 72 Iranian English language learners who enrolled in a study abroad program in language institutes in Mysore, India. This questionnaire was given to these participants at three phases over time as a pre-test (at the beginning), post-test 1 (after three months), and post-test 2 (after six months). A group of 60 native speakers also filled the questionnaire to provide the researcher with criteria for a comparison. The elicited data reveal that the number of employed internal and external modifiers increased in each phase compared with the previous one. The results in this study further indicated that a sustained sojourn in the L2 context provides a positive impact on the study abroad learners’ development in the use of internal and external modifiers. Furthermore, findings from this study show that longer length of stay helps the learners to modify their request utterances more skillfully with internal and external modifiers to make them appropriate according to the context.

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