Iranian EFL Learners' Request Strategies: Interlocutors' Gender in Focus

Iranian EFL Learners' Request Strategies: Interlocutors' Gender in Focus

The current study aims to scrutinize the pragmatic development of Iranian EFL learners through an investigation of the requests strategies with a focus on the interlocutorsʹ gender. Participants of the study included 30 Iranian graduate EFL learners (15 females and 15 males), aged 23 to 31, who responded to a Discourse Completion Task (DCT), which realized the speech act of request. To identify, analyze and code the request strategies employed in the data, the researchers followed Blum-Kulka, House and Kasperʹs (1989b) taxonomy of request strategies. The results indicated that a) the most frequently used request strategies by both genders were found to be query-preparatory, mood-derivable (in the form of imperative) and strong hint, b) no significant difference was observed between males and females with regard to the use of request strategies, c) females were found to be more inclined to employ hedged performatives than males, and d) the interlocutorsʹ power status affects the type of the request strategy used. The study revealed that Iranian EFL learners are pragmatically competent in the performing the speech act of request.