Investigating the Effect of Pragmatic Transfer on the Realization of the Speech Act of Requesting

Abstract

The present study sets out to investigate the effects of pragmatic transfer on the realization of the speech act of requesting. The main goal is to raise learners’ awareness concerning this phenomenon..Our other aim is to bring our contribution to this field of research which is very often overlooked. Moreover, Algerian FL learners in particular tend to rely on their mother tongue in performing certain speech acts which results most of the time in pragmatic failure. Therefore, we hypothesize that if learners are aware of this aspect and make use of appropriate requesting formulae, they will overcome many problems in communication and will develop their pragmatic competence. In order to check the validity of our hypothesis, we opted for a qualitative method by administering a Discourse Completion (DCT henceforth) to third year students at the department of English at Biskra University. We randomly selected 22 students from a population of 220 which we believe are representative of the whole population. In the field work, students' DCT has been prepared and piloted to test the student’s attitudes towards the instructions and situations. After the analysis of the data obtained from the DCT, we found out that the majority of students were able to make the difference between the interlocutors and realized the correct form of requesting. This recognition and pragmatic awareness make them at ease to perform the speech act of requesting successfully which leads us to confirm our hypothesis.