Speech Act of Requesting by postgraduate Students in Context of Myanmar

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the realization of the speech act of requesting by English specialization postgraduate students in Mandalay University. By the application of the coding scheme for speech acts proposed by Blum-Kulka & Olshtain (1984) in their Cross-cultural Speech Acts Realization Patterns (CCSARP) project, the data were collected through a discourse completion test (DCT) questionnaire with twelve created request situations. After identifying the utterances of requesting in their units, this research makes an analysis to discover what request perspective is the most common approach to requests for the English specialization postgraduate students in Myanmar and to explore what request strategies they use when they make a request in the target language. The main findings are that the H-oriented request perspective was the most popular among requests made by the postgraduate students and with regard to the request strategy conventionally indirect request strategies was the most frequently used.