Interlanguage request modification: A case in vocational college

Abstract

There has been much attention given by scholars to the investigation of inter-language pragmatics (ILP), and some of them have been concentrating on how ILP speakers modify their speech acts (SA) of request. This study was aimed at investigating request modification produced by Indonesian English speakers. A group of 23 college students majoring in tourism was involved as research participants. The participants were given two tests using two role play cards with two hotel-context request situations, i.e. low imposing request (R-Rq) and high imposing request (R+ Rq). Pretest was given prior to and post-test was given upon treatment. The situation was chosen based on[1] exemplar generation1 model. The data of request utterances was analyzed and compared with request taxonomies proposed by some scholars. Data analysis showed that the research participants were more competent pragmatically upon the treatment, indicated with the fact where they were able to produce 13 request modification patterns being compared to 11 patterns prior to the treatment.