A Deeper Look into Requests: Insight from Jordanian Speakers of Arabic Vis-À-Vis American English Speaker

Abstract

This study sought to investigate the differences between the request strategies used by Jordanian and American speakers. Data for this study were collected via a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) questionnaire, incorporating 16 real-life scenarios in the form of short descriptive statements. In accordance with the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Patterns, participants' responses (n= 30) divided into three groups (Jordanian Non-English Majors, Jordanian English Majors and American participants). The data were analyzed and further classified into three types based on their level of directness: (i) direct (D), (ii) conventional indirect (ID), and (iii) non-conventional indirect requests (NID).

The results of this study indicate that the act of requesting is performed differently by the three groups of participants. The results also showed that strategy (Reference to Preparatory Cond.) was ranked the highest in percent (87.5%, 67.5%) for the two groups American and Jordanian “Male”) respectively, and (86.3%, 76.3%) %) for the two groups American and Jordanian “Female”) respectively. Also, results showed that the strategy (Locution Deliverable) was ranked the lowest by the Jordanian females sample, just (1.9%).