The Native and Nonnative English Speakers' Speech Act Performances : The Role of Social Distance

The Native and Nonnative English Speakers' Speech Act Performances : The Role of Social Distance

The present study aims to examine how a social variable such as social distance (social familiarity) affects the request speech act performances of Korean nonnative speakers of English and those of native English speakers. The study involved 26 Korean nonnative speakers of English and 20 native English speakers, using a Discourse Completion Task (DCT). The data collected through the DCT were analyzed in terms of the participants' use of (a) request head act strategies and (b) internal and external modification strategies. The present findings show that the social distance variable affected the request head act strategies adopted by the native English speakers, but did not influence the use of request head act strategies by the Korean nonnative speakers of English. As to the use of internal and external modification strategies, the Korean nonnative speakers of English and the native English speakers exhibited the following tendencies: (a) both groups used internal modification strategies in a similar manner. That is, they predominantly used syntactic downgraders, but underused lexical/phrasal downgraders in their requests; (b) The groups also showed a similar tendency in terms of their preference for the use of different types of both syntactic and lexical/phrasal downgraders; (c) Unlike their similar use of internal modification strategies, these groups demonstrated a difference in employing external modification strategies. In contrast to the native English speakers who significantly used various external modification strategies to lessen the impact of the request, the Korean nonnative speakers of English failed to use such strategies; and (d) the Korean nonnative English speakers and native English speakers further showed a gap in terms of their preference for using varying kinds of external modification strategies.