The realisation of request strategies among Malaysian Chinese undergraduates

Abstract

The speech act of request is the most generally employed speech act in social interaction (Wang, 2011) and one of the essential areas in the field of study (Muthusamy, 2016). This study focusses on the realisation of the speech act of request in the academic context. Specifically, this paper aims to address the request strategies, level of directness and request perspectives employed by the Malaysian Chinese ESL undergraduates. Written Discourse Completion Task was adapted to collect responses from 60 undergraduates at a private educational institution in the state of Johor, Malaysia. The results showed that most participants prefer query preparatory strategy at the conventionally indirect level and used the hearer-oriented perspective in most of their requests.