Teaching pragmatic awareness of request strategies

• Main Author: Green, Nicola H.
• Other Authors: Silver, Rita
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Published: 2008
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Language::English
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/14033
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This study looks at the pragmatic awareness of request strategies in English by Japanese native speakers and measures the rise in pragmatic awareness as a result of a series of specific teaching sessions. The subjects were 17 Japanese junior high school students at a Japanese school in Singapore. They were divided into three groups depending on their experience of residency, that is length of time spent residing in a target language environment. The subjects were given a Discourse Completion Task in two parts: part one included open-ended request and apology situations; part two contained multiple-choice request and apology acceptability judgements. The subjects were then given a series of six lessons aimed at raising their pragmatic awareness of request strategies.