A Linguistic Study of The Speech Act of Request in Email Communication in Saudi Arabia as compared to The United Kingdom

Abstract

The current study attempts to investigate request strategies and structures. More specifically, requests in written language that were produced in official emails by Saudi undergraduate students majoring in English language at Qassim university in Saudi Arabia and were sent to their lecturers. The aim of this study is to discover to what extent Saudi English students differ from British native students in formulating requestive emails in academic settings from a cross-cultural perspective. A total number of 109 requestive emails to university lecturers were collected from an online questionnaire by three discourse groups. The groups involved in the study were 47 Saudi English undergraduate students’ group (SESs), 24 British English native undergraduate students’ group (ESs) and 33 Saudi Arabic undergraduate students' group (SSs).The data obtained from the three groups were analysed based on multi-frameworks; Swales (1990) and Bhatia’s (2004) frameworks of move structure were adopted in order to analyse the emails’ components and styles. In addition, the famous coding scheme Cross-Cultural Speech Acts Realisation Project CCSARP (Blum-Kulka et al., 1989) was implemented to discover the ways of performing requests. Findings in general showed that SESs performed differently from ESs. In considering strategies used in forming the request, SESs relied on utilising the direct method. This is similar to what has been found in the SSs data, while ESs had a favour to use indirect request strategy. Regarding the opening and closing of the emails, SESs and SSs had a great tendency to use formal way of approaching their lecturers, ESs, unlike the other groups, they preferred to use an informal method. The results showed that the SESs have mostly performed their requestive emails in somewhere between the formality and Informality where they have made some transformation from their L1, and also faced some pragmatics failure in some parts. The interlanguage-particular issues were caused due to the fallen performance of SESs discourse community among the other 2 discourse communities.