Politeness Strategies: A Study of Request Strategies Used by Arabic Speaking Sudanese learning EFL

Abstract

This is a socio‐linguistic study which attempts to investigate the request strategies used by Sudanese Arabic speakers learning EFL. The study involves a sample of 200 4th year university students. Since 20 of them were excluded from the study, the total number of the subjects is 180, more than half of them are females. A Discourse Completion Test is used to generate data related to the request strategies. The results demonstrate that the subjects generally show a marked tendency towards using direct strategies, especially when their requests are addressed to people in lower or equal positions. In some cases, the participants rely on conventionally indirect strategies when addressing people in higher positions. The study ends up with other important conclusions which reveal that Arab Sudanese learners of English, even at advanced levels, may fall back on their cultural background when formulating their request strategies. Therefore, the cultural differences between Arabic and English language should be taken into account and that an appropriate Arabic request in a given situation may not be an appropriate request in another language in the same situation.