| Requesting as a speech act is one of the most frequently used and the most useful speech act in our daily life. The present study is intended to identify, describe and analyze Chinese EFL learners' patterns of requests in cross-cultural communication in a descriptive and contrastive approach, with the methods of a specific scenario and retrospection, based on DCT (Discourse Completion Task) questionnaire survey.According to the studies on patterns (Saville-Troike 2003: 11) and Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1976: 1657), and the present study, the pattern of request may be defined as an established mode of requesting held in common by the members of a group and given meaning from culture.Austin (1962), Searle (1979), Grice (1975), Ervin-Tripp (1976) , House (1986), Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper (1989), Brown & Levinson (1987), Gu (1990, 1992), Qu & Chen (2001) study request speech acts, request strategies and politeness. Nine strategies and three main strategy types are identified (Searle 1976, Ervin-Tripp 1977, House 1986, Blum-Kulka 1987, Blum-kulka, House and Kasper, 1989). A request proposition can be expressed in different ways.Focusing on request strategy types Chinese scholars carry out contrastive studies between English and Chinese (Zhang &Wang 1997, Song Mei, Lee-Wong 2000, Yang 2001, Liu 2003, He 2001, Jin 2004). Gao (1999) studies features of request strategies in Chinese. Cai (2005) studies patterns of request strategies and patterns of requests theoretically. Up to now, there are a few empirical studies on patterns of requests made by Chinese EFL learners with scenarios including two variables: social power and social distance..The significance of the present study is to reveal patterns of requesting in communicative repertoire and to reveal the relationship between language and culture and to reveal the importance of culture and pragmatic maxims in English learning and teaching.The process of the present research is composed of two steps. The goal of the...
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