The impact of prep class education on effective English requestive e-mails written by students in Turkey

Abstract

For the past years, cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics have focused on native and non-native speech act descriptions, and only a small number of studies have investigated the preparatory class effect involved in speech act productions. To bridge the gap, this study aims to investigate the degree of directness and amount of lexical / phrasal internal and external modifications of requestive e-mails employed by 25 first grade students of English Language and Literature department with preparatory education and 25 first grade students of English Language and Literature department without preparatory education in their in a state university. It also aims to explore whether there is a difference between two groups according to the degree of imposition while making requests. The participants were given discourse completion tests in e-mail format including two different situations with low and high imposition levels and asked to write two requestive e-mails to their non-native professor. The e-mails were analyzed and classified based on Economidou-Kogetsidis’s (2011) framework which relies on Blum- Kulka et al. (1989) and Biesenbach-Lucas (2006, 2007). Based on the percentages and frequencies, the students with preparatory class education were compared to the students without preparatory class education, with respect to their usage of request strategies, lexical/phrasal internal modification and external modification. The results indicated that these two groups had both similarities and differences with respect to the degree of directness, the amount of internal and external modifications. Turkish ELL learners with and without prep class education employed more direct strategies in both situations. However, the group without prep class education employed more conventionally indirect strategies than the group with prep class education. None of the participants used non-conventionally indirect strategies. The group with prep class education used more internal modification than the group without prep class education. The most common internal modification was the consultative device in both groups. As for external modification, the group with prep class education utilized more supportive moves than the group without prep class education. Grounder was the most preferred supportive move by both groups.   Keywords: Turkish ELL learners; requestive e-mails; academic e-mails; directness.