Inappropriateness in Iraqi EFL Learners’ E-mail Requests to Professor

Abstract

This study investigates the use of the speech act of request by Iraqi EFL (English as a foreign language) learners in student-professor e-mail communication. It aims to examine request strategies and internal modifications in academic requests in e-mail. There has been little investigation of the issue of an academic request made by Arab EFL learners to a higher status person via an authentic data. Thus, this study intends to provide more investigation of the strategies and internal modifiers that are produced by Iraqi EFL learners when they interact with their professors via e-mail. However, this study adapts the CCSARP (cross-cultural speech act realization project) originally suggested by [12] and modified by [8] in terms of strategies and internal modifications. Findings uncover that Iraqi EFL learners have a pragmatic problem when they issue their requests to a higher authority by e-mail. They mainly produce direct requests to higher status individuals. Such types of request require conventional indirectness to be appropriate pragmatically. These learners have limited pragmatic knowledge of conventional indirectness when they produce their requests to their professors. Moreover, Iraqi EFL learners are influenced by their L1 (first language) as they resort to direct sub-strategies that are customary forms in their Iraqi Arabic. This research unveils that Iraqi EFL learners have pragmalinguistic knowledge in syntactic downgraders and a pragmalinguistic deficiency in lexical devices due to the structurally oriented approach used to teach these learners.