Strategies of Request in light of Linguistic Politeness Theory: Pragmatic study of a Sample of HSL Learners and Native Hebrew Speakers.

This research reviewed the concept of pragmatic competence and its importance in language acquisition, and then moved on to request acts that contribute to facilitating the process of acquiring Hebrew as a second language (HSL).
Then the research moved to the idea of politeness in requesting, referring to politeness strategies as proposed by Brown and Levinson (1978,1987) and request strategies as patterned by Blum-Kulka(1989). The data was collected based on a discourse completion test (DCT) questionnaire, including five different situations in Hebrew. The participants were 60 individuals, divided into 30 Israeli native Hebrew speakers and 30 Egyptian (HSL) learners. Data was collected and analyzed according to the taxonomy of Blum-Kulka et al.(1989) Cross-Cultural Speech Acts Realization Patterns (CCSARP) for requests to determine the similarities and differences in responses between two groups according to the level of directness and the pragmatic proficiency among Egyptian learners of Hebrew as a second language (HSL) in realizing requesting acts in different social situations.
The results showed that Egyptians succeeded in realizing speech acts of request in various social situations compared to the responses of Israeli participants. Therefore, the findings indicate that they were linguistically and pragmatically competent for realizing requests in Hebrew as a second language.