REQUESTIVE E-MAILS OF TURKISH EFL LEARNERS: A COMPARISON WITH NATIVE SPEAKERS OF ENGLISH AND NATIVE SPEAKERS OF TURKISH
Abstract
This study aims to investigate the degree of directness and amount of lexical / phrasal internal and external modifications employed by 20 Turkish EFL learners, 10 native speakers of English, and 10 native speakers of Turkish. It also aims to explore whether there is a difference across three groups while making requests. The participants were asked to write two requestive e-mails to a friend and a 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). The results indicated that these three groups had both similarities and differences with respect to the degree of directness, the amount of internal and external modifications. Turkish EFL learners and native speakers of Turkish resorted to more direct strategies, while native speakers of English performed more conventionally indirect strategies. None of the participants utilized non-conventionally indirect strategies. Turkish EFL learners were very similar to native speakers of Turkish in the formation of their request head act. They showed strong similarities in the formation of certain structures as the basis of request. However, the internal and external modification indicated that the phrases Turkish EFL learners utilized were similar to native speakers of English.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejel.v0i0.1108
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