Politeness strategies in the English interlanguage requests of Yemeni learners

This study attempts empirically to investigate the ways in which Yemeni learners realize requests in their English interlanguage with special reference to politeness strategies as patterned by Brown and Levinson (1987). The main objective of this paper is to investigate the strategies of requests and politeness phenomenon in the production of request speech act by Yemeni learners of English as a foreign language. It is based on the analysis of the elicited responses given to 314 subjects belonging to the departments of English in four colleges of two public Yemeni universities. The data collected through written questionnaire based on Blum-Kulka (1983, 1984) with some modifications. The corpus obtained consists of 1256 valid corpus. Each of the valid responses was analyzed separately to identify the type of strategies used. The study is of a descriptive nature, frequencies, percentages and the means of these percentages are used. The main aim is to find out the politeness strategies used and the frequency of their use. The main findings of the study revealed that the target subjects intended to use conventional indirectness strategies with constant tendency to use query preparatory request strategy accompanying with politeness markers.