Appropriateness in requests: Perspectives of Russian EFL learners

This study analyses whether two types of variables (i.e., social standings of interlocutors (a student and a professor) and linguistic forms embedded into head speech acts of requests) affect the perceptions of Russian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) about the appropriateness/politeness of requests. By completing an elaborated semi-oral Discourse Completion Task (DCT), twenty American undergraduate students produced eighty request utterances. The most frequent and consistent request patterns were then used to form five different types of head speech acts. These five head speech act forms were then evaluated by thirty-nine Russian EFL learners. To do the evaluation, Russian subjects completed an acceptability questionnaire that involved a ten-point Likert-type evaluation scale and a written protocol. The findings of the study partially support the hypothesis that Russian EFL learners evaluate more conventionally indirect request patterns as more appropriate/polite when they are aimed at the professor and as less appropriate/polite when they are aimed at the student. Comparison of the social standings of the addressees used in the contextual situations and the linguistic forms embedded into the head speech acts of requests revealed that not all of them influenced the perceptions of Russian EFL learners about the appropriateness/politeness of requests. The findings from the EFL instructors' interviews also suggest that when evaluating appropriateness/politeness of requests, Russian EFL learners demonstrated negative pragmatic transfer from Russian and were influenced by classroom effect.