Pragmatic Awareness of the Request Speech Act in English as an Additional Language: Monolinguals or Bilinguals?

This study attempted to investigate the effect of bilingualism on pragmaticawareness and development among Iranian Turkish/Persian EFL learners. Data werecollected through a personal profile questionnaire with questions about theparticipants’ language background and a WDCT with 10 situations to determine theextent to which the bilinguals demonstrated their pragmatic awareness of requests.They were to read the situations and assess whether they realized the(in)appropriateness of the speech acts. For inappropriateness, they were also askedto explicate their selections and provide appropriate alternatives. Responses wereanalyzed according to 3 social factors of power, distance, and degree of impositionwith the assumption that the more references to these factors, the morepragmatically aware the participants. Alternatives were coded according to thecoding scheme of CCSARP. Results showed that none of the groups outperformedthe others in their perception of the (in)appropriate acts and in the realizationpatterns of request acts in trilingual education. This failure may be due to their lackof cultural awareness, literary skills, and insufficient L2/L3 pragmatic input.