The Speech Act Of Requests By Vietnamese College Students: A Pragmatic Study

Abstract

The aim of this study is to re-examine the relationship between politeness and speech acts applied to making requests within the context framed by a contextexternal variable - social distance. By means of quantitative analysis, the research is conducted to raise the cultural awareness of foreigners who are learning Vietnamese. In the scope of methodology, the experimental setup bears a close resemblance to the FTAs strategies proposed by Brown and Levinson (1987) since they have been considered as the main culprit for cross-cultural misunderstandings in communication. The data are described by the mother tongue on the cultural viewpoints of 100 Vietnamese university/college students. Reportedly, the findings highlighted that the Bald on record strategy had a greater frequency than the other four strategies in the familiar stage. Meanwhile, requests were modified preferably by means of Politeness strategy in the unfamiliar stage. These results point to the probability that social distance between interlocutors prompts different frequencies of politeness strategies. Overall, this study is the first step towards enhancing foreigners’ understanding of the use of request strategies in Vietnamese’s different contexts. This contribution sheds new light on teaching and learning involving building cross-cultural awareness as well as pragmatic competence in Vietnamese language.