Practice through Interaction: Asking Someone to Do Something in English

This paper has an aim to examine English native speakers' requests, and offer an instructional technique to develop EFL students' pragmatic ability. For this purpose, English-speaking native speakers' requests were collected in six different face-threatening situations, and analyzed in three ways: directness levels, internal modification and sequence of request. The analysis of requests showed that they were realized mainly through conventionally indirect level in most situations, were internally modified frequently through the use of downgraders, and had a certain sequence of utterances realizing a request. On the basis of these findings, two kinds of interactional activities (Jigsaw and pair work) were provided as sample activities to promote EFL students' pragmatic knowledge about the appropriate ways of making requests given the fact that pragmatic errors can be more serious and more problematic than grammatical errors in social interaction.