Volume 5 (2014) Issue 1
Electronic
Requests in Native and Non-Native Russian:
Insights
into Foreign Language Learners’
Sociolinguistic
Competence
Anna
Krulatz
(Trondheim, Norway)
Abstract
This
study compares electronic requests written by native and non-native
speakers of Russian. 184 responses were elicited via a discourse
completion task with four scenarios. Using a framework adapted from
the cross-cultural speech acts realization project (CCSRAP)
(Blum-Kulka et al. 1989), the analysis focused on the strategies used
to construct the head act of request (i.e. direct, conventionally
indirect, and non-conventionally indirect) and internal and external
modifications (i.e. alerters, upgraders, downgraders and supportive
moves), and it revealed that while the use of some of
the non-native speaker strategies approximates that of the native
speakers, the requests produced by the
two groups differ on several dimensions. The findings of the study
confirm the hypothesis that even advanced foreign language learners
often do not fully develop certain aspects of sociolinguistic
competence.
Key
words: speech
acts, electronic requests, sociolinguistic competence, foreign
language acquisition
Аннотация
Это
исследование сравнивает электронные
запросы, написанные родными и неродными
носителями русского языка. Было собрано
184 ответа на задачу завершения дискурса
по четырем сценариям. Применяя методику,
адаптированную из проекта осуществления
кросс-культурных речевых актов (CCSRAP)
(Блюм-Кулка соавт., 1989), мы сосредоточили
анализ на стратегиях, используемых для
построения главного акта запроса (то
есть прямых, условнокосвенных и
неусловнокосвенных), а также на внутренних
и внешних мотиваторах (таких, как
сигнализаторы, обогатители, принижающие
и вспомогательные ходы). Анализ показал,
что хотя некоторые из неносителей
применяют стратегии на приближенном к
носителям языка уровне, запросы,
произведенные двумя группами, отличаются
по нескольким параметрам. Результаты
исследования подтверждают гипотезу,
что даже изучившие иностранный язык на
продвинутом уровне часто не полностью
развивают определенные аспекты
социолингвистической компетенции.
Ключевые
слова: речевые
акты, электронные
запросы,
социолингвистическая компетенция,
приобретение иностранного языка
1 Introduction
Sociolinguistic
competence can be defined as the ability to make situationally
appropriate linguistic choices based on the status differences
between interlocutors, the context of the linguistic exchange, and
the level of imposition created by the message (Bachman & Palmer
2010, Canale & Swain 1980). This aspect of linguistic competence
poses serious challenges for foreign and second language learners
because “what counts as socio-pragmatically appropriate is guided
by social, cultural and personal preferences and the dynamics of the
ongoing interaction” (Kasper & Rose 2002: 262). Establishing
(and teaching) native-like sociopragmatic norms is not as
straightforward as stating grammatical rules. Even though the
importance of raising language learners’ socio-pragmatic awareness
and increasing their levels of sociolinguistic competence have been
stressed in recent literature related to language teaching (e.g.
Bardovi-Harlig & Mahan-Taylor 2002, Ishihara 2010,
Félix-Brasdefer & Cohen 2012), even advanced language learners
rather frequently fail to approximate native sociopragmatic norms.
When a language learner uses inappropriate linguistic means to
perform a speech act such as a request, pragmalinguistic failure
occurs (Thomas 1983: 99). Native speakers tend to judge
pragmalinguistic failure much more harshly than grammatical mistakes
(Biesenbach-Lucas 2007; Hartford / Bardovi-Harlig 1996; Hendricks,
2010).
As
face-threatening speech acts, i.e. speech acts that threaten
interlocutors’ public self-image (Brown / Levinson 1987), requests
have been extensively studied from the cross-cultural and
cross-linguistic perspective. It is by now well-established that
while a request consists of an obligatory element, the head act, and
optional modifications (internal and external), the linguistic means
used to construct requests vary across languages and cultures.
Several studies have revealed that native and non-native speakers
differ in how they perform requests. With regards to Russian, Mills
(1993) found that non-native speakers tend to transfer strategies
from their first language, which are often inappropriate in the
target language (e.g. the use of ‘Can you?’ or ‘Could you?’
to perform requests in Russian). Owen (2002) found that non-native
speakers only started to approximate native speaker norms after an
extensive study-abroad experience. Similar findings have been
reported in regards to other target languages and first language
backgrounds(Blum-Kulka & Olshtain 1986, Kasanga 2006, Hacking
2008, and Lin 2009 all report differences between native and
non-native production of requests). 1
The
present study attempts
to further research on
interlanguage requests in Russian. It focuses on two aspects of
sociolinguistic competence as defined by Celce-Murcia, Dornyei and
Thurrell (1995), namely actional competence, or the ability to
express communicative intent, use conventionalized forms and
formulaic expressions, and formulate direct and indirect speech acts;
and discourse competence, or the ability to select, sequence and
arrange words, structures and sentences, and to use openings,
closings, cohesion, coherence, genres and deixis. Specifically, the
study examines the ability of non-native speakers of Russian to
produce email requests as compared to native-speakers, and it aims to
answer the following research questions:
- How do native and non-native speakers of Russian formulate the head acts of requests in emails?
- What internal and external modifications of requests are used by these two groups of participants?
2 Study Design
2.1 Participants
There
were two groups of participants in this study: native speakers and
non-native speakers of Russian. The first group of participants
(n=20)
consisted of 7 males and 13 females, ages 18-35, all of whom resided
in Russia at the time of the study. The non-native speaker group
(n=21)
consisted of 13 males and 8 females, aged 18-40, all of whom resided
in the United States at the time of the study, spoke English as their
first language, and were either students enrolled in a third or
fourth year of Russian study at the University of Utah, or alumni who
had completed at least 3 years of Russian before graduation.
Prior
to participating in the study, all non-native participants were asked
to complete a questionnaire to obtain information about their
language background and a self-report about their level of Russian.
Eighteen of the non-native participants were former missionaries of
the Church
of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints (LDS)
and had served their 1.5-2 year-long mission in a Russian speaking
country. This
means that they had completed a two-month long Russian language
training at a Missionary Training Center and spoke Russian between 5
to 9 hours per day during their mission.
The remaining three informants participated in a study-abroad program
(between two to eight weeks) in a Russian speaking country. 10% of
the American participants indicated that they felt comfortable using
Russian in all environments, and the remaining 90% reported that they
felt comfortable using Russian in most situations.
The
non-native speakers of Russian were also asked to take a pre-test to
ensure that their level of grammatical competence was advanced enough
to complete the tasks in the study. The test was developed
specifically for the purpose of the study and elicited grammatical
structures needed for the production of Russian requests, namely
imperatives, personal pronouns in the dative case, conditional
sentences, polite forms of address and the conjugation of the verb
pisat
('to
write').
2.2 Data Collection
and Analysis
The
data in this study were collected on the basis of a discourse
completion task
(DCT). Participants were given four scenarios that elicited requests,
and asked to compose four email messages addressed to imaginary
Russian professors in Russia. The example below illustrates the instructions
the participants received. All instructions for participants were
provided in Russian.
Example: DCT task for participants
You completed your undergraduate degree in history at Moscow State University. Write an email to Professor Andrey Sergeevich Dvornichenkoin, with whom you took a Russian history class, and ask him to write you a letter of recommendation for a scholarship.
The
analysis of the responses focused on head acts as well as external
and internal modifications, using a coding system adapted from the
cross-cultural
speech acts realization project
(CCSARP) (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989: 273-294). The following head act
categories were distinguished:
- Direct requests, i.e. requests whose content can be determined from the linguistic content alone, е.g. imperatives such as podskažite, požaluysta (‘indicate, please’),
- Conventionally indirect requests, i.e. ambiguous formulaic utterances that can be interpreted as a request, e.g. ne mogli by vy (‘couldn’t you’),
- Non-conventionally indirect requests, i.e. ambiguous sentences with multiple possible speaker-dependent interpretations, one of which can be a request, e.g. mne tak xolodno (‘I’m so cold’) used as a requests to close the window.
In addition to the head
acts, external and internal request modifications were analyzed. The
following modification categories were used:
- Alerters, i.e. titles, names, terms of endearment and personal pronouns, e.g. polite vy (‘you’) vs. familiar ty (‘you’),
- Downgraders, i.e. lexical, phrasal and syntactic modifications used to reduce the force of the request, e.g. požalujsta (‘please’),
- Upgraders, i.e. modifications used to intensify the force of the request, e.g. kak možno skoree (‘as soon as possible’)
- Supportive moves, e.g. a justification of the request or a promise of a reward, e.g. u mena voznikli nekotorye voprosy po kursu (‘I have some questions about the course’), or ja budu vam blagodarnyj (‘I will be very grateful’).
3 Results and
Discussion
A total of 164 emails -
80 of which written by native and 84 written by non-native speakers
of Russian - were produced by participants (i.e. four emails per
participant) and analyzed. The analysis focused on the identification
of similarities and differences in the use of request strategies
between the two groups of participants. The analysis included the
head act as well as internal and external modifications.
3.1 Head Acts
The
head
act
is the part of request that realizes the act independently of
other
elements. Three kinds of head-act realizations were found in the data
collected for this study:
- direct,
- conventionally indirect, and
- non-conventionally indirect realizations.
In
the framework of the
direct strategies, the following categories were distinguished:
- mood derivable (imperatives), e.g. podskažite, požaluysta (‘indicate, please’);
- explicit performatives, or utterances with explicitly marked illocutionary force, e.g. obraščajus k vam s prosboj (‘I am turning to you with a request’);
- hedged performatives, where the verb expressing the request is modified by a modal or a verb expressing intention, e.g. ja xotel by obratitsja k vam s prosboj (‘I would like to turn to you with a request’), and
- want statements, or the utterances expressing the speaker’s desire that the request be granted, e.g. ja xotela by uznat (‘I would like to know’). Figure 1 illustrates the distribution of different types of direct strategies among the two groups of informants:
Figure 1: Direct
strategies used by NS (native speakers) and NNS (non-native speakers)
As
can be seen, the non-native speakers
showed a strong preference for want
statements which comprised 43% of all strategies
used by this group. In contrast, the native speakers of Russian
preferred explicit performatives, at
22% of all strategies. Contrary to previous findings (e.g. Ogiermann
2003, where imperatives made up 35% of the Russian requests), in the
present study, imperatives were not very common among the native
speakers of Russian (7%).
The conventionally
indirect strategies, i.e. conventionalized utterances that contained
references to ability, willingness, or possibility, included four
types of preparatory utterances:
- query preparatory (interrogatives);
- negative preparatory utterances, e.g. ne mogli by vy (‘couldn’t you’);
- positive preparatory utterances (e.g. mogli by vy (‘could you’), and
- conditional preparatory statements (e.g. esli vy smožete (‘if you could’).
Figure 2 summarizes these
findings:
Figure 2:
Conventionally indirect strategies used by NS and NNS
Overall,
native speakers seemed to prefer the negative preparatory strategy
(40% of all requests), in comparison with only 11% of all non-native
requests. An opposite trend could be observed in the case of positive
preparatory strategies. While this strategy was used by only 2% of
the native speakers, and only in
impersonal
constructions, it was employed by the non-native speakers in 12% of
their requests, and only in 5 out of these 12 requests, an impersonal
construction was used.
Non-conventionally
indirect requests were almost absent from the data, at
1% for each group. This is consistent with earlier findings (e.g.
Mills 1993).
3.2 Request
Modifications
The
analysis of external modifications focused on downgraders, upgraders,
alerters and supportive moves. Downgraders
are defined as linguistic means that decrease the impact of a
request. The most common downgraders found of the data of
the present study were conditional clauses
(e.g.
ja by vam byl očen’ blagodarny jesli by vy mogli eto dla mena
sdelat (‘I
would be very grateful if you could do this for me’))
and the
lexical downgrader požalujsta
('please'),
which typically occurred with imperative
constructions. Downgraders were found in 36% of the messages written
by the native and in 43% of the messages written by the non-native
participants.
In
contrast to downgraders, upgraders
actually increase the impact of a request. They include intensifiers
such as očen
trudno
(‘very difficult’) and time intensifiers such as kak
možno skoree (‘as
soon as possible’), ešče
raz
(‘one more time’) and ne
pozdnee vtornika
(‘no later than Tuesday’). Upgraders were not common in the
messages written by the native speakers (6%), but they were more
frequent in those written by the non-native speakers taking part in
this study (19%).
In
the present study, alerters
include salutations and closings. As far as salutations are
concerned, non-native speakers made more diverse choices than
native-speakers, and they used certain salutations not found
in the native-speaker data. For
example, they showed a strong preference for addressing the recipient
as ‘professor’ (65%), a category that is nearly non-existent in
the native speaker data (1%). In the same fashion,
the use of ‘dear’ and ‘dear professor’ in the non-native data
account for 17.5% of all messages whereas native speakers did not use
this form of address at all. On
the other hand, the majority of native speakers (40%) used uvažaemyj
/ uvažaemaja
(‘respected’), followed by zdravstvujte
(‘hello’) (25%), both of which were rarely used by non-native
speakers. Overall, respected,
which was present in 52% of the native speaker emails, was only
employed by 13% of American respondents.
There
were a lot of diversity and several discrepancies between the two
groups when it came to closings. Seventeen different expressions were
distinguished among the closings used by non-native speakers, and 13
different closings were used by native speakers. The most common
closing used by the native-speaker group was s
uvaženiem
(‘with respect’) (53 instances) whereas non-native speakers used
this expression in only 15 instances. On the other hand, non-native
speakers employed some closings which were either absent or rarely
employed in native speaker data, for example spasibo
za vašu pomošč
(‘thank you for your help’), spasibo
za vaše vremja
(‘thank you for your time’), and spasibo
za vsjo
(‘thank you for everything’).
The
final category of modifications distinguished in the present study
represents supportive moves. These include preparators (e.g. asking
for permission to make a request), imposition minimizers
(e.g. no
tolko esli u vas jest vremja
(‘but
only if you have time’)), disarmers (i.e. modifications that remove
any potential objections), and grounders (i.e. reasons and
explanations). Interestingly, both groups of participants used
similar supportive moves to modify their requests. Overall, 92% of
the native speakers and 93% of the non-native speakers used
supportive moves to modify their requests.
The
preparators used in the data can be divided into those that provide
general information about the context of the request
(e.g. ja
vaš byvšyj student,
‘I
am your former student;’
nadejus
što vy mena pomnite,
‘I
hope you remember me;’
or
ja
tolko što zaveršil učebnuju programmu u vas,
‘I
have just graduated from your program’), and those that provide
more detailed information about the writer of the message (e.g. Mena
zovut X i ja student v vašem kurse russkoj literatury
‘My
name is X and I am a student in your Russian literature class;’
or
ja
student gruppy numer pjat
‘I
am a student from group No. 5’).
Table
1 summarizes the percentage of participants who used these two types
of preparators:
- GroupGeneral contextDetailed informationNative speakers39%51%Non-native speakers36%15%
Table. 1: The use of
preparators by native and non-native speakers
Imposition
minimizers are expressions that are supposed to reduce the level of
imposition on the recipient of the message (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989:
287). In the present study, all imposition minimizers made a
reference to using a professor’s time, e.g., ja
znaju što vy zanjatyj
(‘I understand that you are very busy’), or kogda
vam udobno
(‘when it is convenient for you’). In the NS data, 31% of the
requests were mitigated with an imposition minimizer, in comparison
with 24% of the NNS requests.
Disarmers,
defined as expressions used to remove any potential objections to the
request (Blum-Kulka et al. 1989: 287), were employed in 34% of the
messages sent by the native speaker and in 25% of those sent by the
non-native speakers. The participants in the present study mostly
used statements about their good academic standing (e.g. good grades,
high test scores), their interest in and thankfulness for the course,
compliments on the
addressees’
accomplishments, or references to difficulties with the course.
Grounders, or reasons,
explanations and justifications in support of a request were commonly
employed by both groups of participants. Overall, 80% of the native
messages and 74% of the non-native messages contained grounders. Some
examples of these are references to the scholarship of the addressee,
the desire to enter university or continue education, and a need to
discuss a question with the addressee.
4 Conclusions
4.1 Summary
The
present study investigated certain aspects of the participants’
sociolinguistic competence by examining the extent to which
electronic requests written by native and non-native speakers of
Russian were similar or different. A detailed analysis of the head
acts and head act modifications revealed interesting discrepancies as
well as similarities. Both groups of participants used a varied
repertoire of strategies, and used similar numbers of direct,
conventionally indirect and non-conventionally indirect strategies.
The two groups also showed similarities in their use of mood
derivable statements, hedged performatives, query preparatory
strategies and strong hints. However, the native-speaker participants
showed a strong preference for explicit performatives and preparatory
negative statements. The non-native-speaker group, on the other hand,
over-relied on want
statements and preparatory positive statements, which were rarely
used by the native-speakers.
The native and non-native
speakers also differed in the way they used internal and external
modifications of the requests, for instance in the choice of openings
and closings, in the frequency of use of upgraders and in the amount
of detailed information about the context of the request they
provided. Nonetheless, the analysis revealed several similarities in
the use of supportive moves (grounders, disarmers and imposition
minimizers).
Discrepancies between the
native and non-native use of request strategies suggest that the
non-native participants’ sociolinguistic competence did not
completely match native norms. Even though the non-natives used a
similar proportion of direct and conventionally indirect strategies
and mitigated their requests, using supportive moves similar to those
employed by the native speakers, several instances of
pragmalinguistic failure could be identified in the data. Mills
(1993) distinguished the following categories of pragmalinguistic
failure in her study of Russian requests:
- More verbosity – preparators, pre-requests, grounders; a greater inclination to provide a rationale for making a request;
- avoidance of the direct imperative;
- an overreliance on English forms questioning the addressee’s ability to perform the request;
- an overreliance on typical Russian syntactic structures related to extremely polite speech behavior (combinations comprised of negative, conditional, andinterrogative particles).
Based on a careful
examination of those areas in which the non-native speakers differed
from the native speakers, the following additional categories of
pragmalinguistic failure are proposed:
- An overreliance on want statements and positive preparatory strategies,
- underrepresentation of explicit performatives and negative preparatory strategies,
- an overuse of upgraders,
- a non-native like use of closings (i.e., the preference of ‘many thanks’ over ‘with respect’),
- insufficient acknowledgement of the imposition (this was in accordance with Hartford & Bardovi-Harlig 1996) and
- insufficient information about the background of the sender.
4.2 Limitations of the
Study
It
has to be recognized that this study is not without any limitations.
Most importantly, the four prompts used in the DCT were quite similar
in terms of context (academic), addressee (a Russian professor) and
content (a request). Consequently, the range of strategies used by
the participants may have been quite limited and repetitious.
Secondly, the non-native participants were not typical foreign
language learners. Most of them were former LDS missionaries who had
received extensive instruction in Russian and spent a long period of
time interacting with native speakers in the target culture setting.
Being missionaries and attempting to convert native speakers of
Russian to their faith, they may have paid special attention to the
choice of language strategies so that they could integrate
more easily into
the target language community. Therefore, their sociolinguistic
competence may have developed
to a higher degree
than that of foreign language learners without comparable experience.
Notwithstanding the
limitations of this study, the findings suggest that, while acquiring
the sociolinguistic knowledge and skills may take a long time,
certain approximations to a native-speaker choice of language
strategies exist.
4.3 Pedagogical
Implications
The
results of this and other studies (e.g. Mills 2003 and Ogiermann
2003) suggest that there is a need for explicit instruction to
enhance learners’ sociopragmatic competence. This is in concord
with several recent publications in the area of interlanguage
pragmatics which suggest specific classroom solutions (e.g.
Bardovi-Harlig & Mahan-Taylor 2002, Ishihara 2010,
Félix-Brasdefer & Cohen 2012). Instruction could focus on
specific speech acts such as requests, apologies, compliments, or
invitations, and it could include activities such as raising
awareness about the differences between the realization of speech
acts in the first language and the target language, the
collection and analysis of native-speaker examples and personal
journals or
logs about
their own use of speech acts by the language learners.
We would also like to suggest
that in order to make teaching of sociopragmatic skills happen in the
classroom, well-designed, easy-to-use pedagogical materials have to
be created. Such materials may easily be accessible for English and
other commonly taught languages such as German and Spanish, but they
are hardly
available to teachers of other, less commonly taught languages. The
body of research on cross-cultural differences in the realization of
speech acts is extremely rich. The next step is to put these findings
to a practical end.
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Author:
Anna
Krulatz, PhD
Associate
Professor
Sør-Тrøndelag
University College
Department
of English
Rotvoll
allé
Trondheim
Norway
Email:
anna.m.krulatz@hist.no
1
In this
context, Blum-Kulka & Olshtain 1986, Kasanga 2006, Hacking 2008,
and Lin 2009, for example, all report differences between the native
and non-native production of requests.