The impact of social power and social distance on the request strategies employed by Saudi learners and teachers of English as a foreign Language

الملخص EN

This study examines the effects of the social power and distance on the strategies employed by Saudi learners and teachers of EFL in performing the speech act of requests.

The participants of this study are twenty-five students and nine teachers at the university of Jeddah.

All of them are Saudi females.

The instrument of data collection was a Discourse Completion Task (DCT).

The results of the study revealed that the conventional indirect strategies are the most used ones by the participants followed by the direct strategies.

The results also showed that the choice of the request strategies was based on the relationships between the interlocutors as most of the requests were influenced by the social power and social distance factors.

It is hoped that this study will facilitate the acquisition of English pragmatics by Arab learners of English and ease communication not only inside the English classrooms but also with native speakers of English.