Requests in English and in Turkish in the language of Turkish student teachers: A comparative study

Abstract

The present study was conducted to find out to what extent Turkish student teachers choose to use appropriate request forms in English and in Turkish by considering situational factors. In addition, it was aimed to investigate whether Turkish student teachers transfer Turkish request forms into English. The data were gathered from 190 university students studying at Uludağ University in Bursa. They were all student teachers attending to English Language Teaching Department. 90 of them were first year and 100 of them were third year students. The instruments used in collecting the data were discourse completion tests in both English and Turkish and interviews designed by taking into consideration the situational factors, namely power, social distance and size of imposition involved in the request. The analysis revealed that the student teachers differ in their preferences for direct, conventionally indirect and non-conventionally indirect request strategies with respect to social factors. The findings showed evidence for both appropriate and inappropriate performance of requests in English and in Turkish. The data revealed that informants transferred some verb preferences, length of utterances, etc. from Turkish into English which may lead them to communicative failures.