Speaker
KEYWORDS
requesting, grammatical knowledge, mitigation
ABSTRACT
The directive speech act of requesting is often sensitive to politeness and typically requires a highly conventionalized approach favoring indirectness (Leech, 2014). Native English speakers frequently use mitigating devices such as the past tense, the continuous aspect, and embedding to reduce directness to perform requesting (Wigglesworth & Yates, 2007). The studies by Ashoorpur and Azqri (2014) and Huschova (2021) have highlighted a correlation between learners’ grammatical knowledge and their pragmatic competence in performing this speech act appropriately. This study explores grammar books used in Japanese high schools as supplementary resources. The instances of grammatical knowledge related to requesting are identified and categorized based on their type. The study examines the specific grammatical features introduced in connection with requesting and evaluates how metapragmatic information is presented for each feature. Additionally, it compares differences across grammar books in terms of the types of grammatical knowledge and metapragmatic information provided for requesting. The findings reveal variations in the grammatical knowledge and mitigation strategies introduced through the speech act of requesting. At the end, the study offers practical suggestions for teachers to enhance pragmatic instruction by adapting and utilizing these examples effectively and providing communicative contexts for language use.
| TITLE | Exploring the Speech Act of Requesting in High School Grammar Instruction |
|---|---|
| RELEVANT SIG | Pragmatics |
| FORMAT | Research-oriented Oral Face-to-face presentation (25 minutes, including Q&A) |
