Inspecting Pragmatic Analysis of Strategies Employed by Iranian EFL Learners in Realization of the Speech Act of Requests

The present paper explores the use of pragmatic strategies by Iranian EFL learners in fulfilling the speech act of request. Accordingly, the analytical classification of request strategies suggested by Blum-Kulka & Olshtain (1984) and the cross-cultural speech act realization patterns (CCSARP) coding manual (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989) were used to examine the corresponding features of pragmatic strategies employed by 22 upper-intermediate Iranian EFL learners in performing the speech act of request. To this end, this descriptive study analyzed the participants’ utterances in both informal and formal situations using a Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT). The outcomes revealed that among nine request strategies classified by Blum-Kulka & Olshtain (1984), Iranian EFL learners most frequently employed the “query preparatory strategy” as a conventional indirectness strategy on request in informal and formal situations. However, they used the direct strategy of “want statement” in informal contexts.