Language Centres at a Crossroads

Since the notion of 'communicative competence' was coined by Hymes in 1972, the components of communicative competence have been refined by several scholars (Hymes, 1972; Canale & Swain, 1980; Bachman, 1990; Bachman & Palmer, 1996; Usó-Juan & Martínez-Flor, 2006). The paradigm of communicative competence has changed the trends in second language teaching and learning as well as in second language acquisition research.
Therefore, the focus of interlanguage research has extended to the study of L2 learners' pragmatic and discourse competence. The L2 performance of speech acts of requests has attracted considerable attention worldwide. However, how Czech learners realise their requests in English has not yet been investigated.
This presentation shows the findings of a study of the interlanguage pragmatic competence of Czech university students in making requests in English (L2). The aim of the study was to find the types of strategy (direct, conventionally indirect or non-conventionally indirect) and internal and external request modifications, and their frequency of use.
Data were elicited using an open-ended written discourse completion task (WDCT) which contained five formal and five informal request scenarios, all designed with regard to the following variables: social distance and social status/power.
An overwhelming majority of responses were classified as conventionally indirect requests in both data sets (formal and informal situations), while other strategies (direct or non-conventionally indirect) occurred rarely. Moreover, in most cases the participants opted for grounders as external request modifications – when providing explanations, reasons or justifications for their requests. As far as the internal request modification is concerned, the lexical downgrader please was employed most often, while among the syntactic downgraders, the conditional structure was used in most cases regardless of the above-mentioned two variables.
The findings reveal that in their request performance, Czech learners of English as L2 tend to employ conventionally indirect strategy irrespective of the formality or informality of the situation, and that their use of modifications (both internal and external) is significantly limited.
Key words: pragmatic competence, speech act of request, request strategies, internal and external request modifications

Tato prezentace představuje předběžné výsledky studie zabývající se mezijazykovou pragmatickou kompetencí českých studentů anglického jazyka jako cizího jazyka (L2). Cílem studie je zjistit, jaké typy strategií používají při vyjádření žádosti, včetně jejich interní a externí modifikace, a s jakou četností.

Nástrojem sběru dat byl písemný dotazník ve formě kompletace diskurzu (discourse completion task), v jehož rámci byly stanoveny dvě proměnné – sociální odstup a sociální status.

hovoří o tom, že bez ohledu na sociální proměnné převážná většina respondentů při vyjádření žádosti používala konvenčně nepřímé strategie, přičemž jako externí modifikaci volili zdůvodnění své žádosti. Za nejčastější interní modifikace lze považovat lexikální zmírnění žádosti pomocí slova please a syntaktické zmírnění pomocí kondicionálu.

References:

• Bachman, L. F. (1990). Fundamental considerations in language testing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Bachman, L. F., & Palmer, A. S. (1996). Language testing in practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Canale, M. & Swain M. (1980). Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Lingustics, 1(1), 1-47.
• Hymes, D. H. (1972). On communicative competence. In J. B. Pride & Holmes, J. (Eds.), Sociolinguistics (pp. 269–293). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
• Usó-Juan, E., & Martínez-Flor, A. (2006). Current trends in the development and teaching of the four language skills. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Marie Lahodová Vališová is an ESP teacher at the Masaryk University Language Centre, Faculty of Medicine, Brno, Czech Republic. Currently, she is a postgraduate student at the Faculty of Education, Masaryk University. The topic of her dissertation is 'Linguistic Politeness of Czech university students in the English language (L2). A cross-cultural comparison'. The aim of the study is to compare the strategies and expressions of linguistic politeness used by Czech learners of English as L2 to those used by native speakers of English. She got her Master's degree in History, and English and American Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University (1996–2002).