Politeness Strategies in Arabic Request Speech Acts by Non-Native Speakers at Ma'had Al Imarat
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Abstract
This study aims to identify the request strategies employed by non-native speakers of Arabic and to analyze how these strategies reflect politeness orientations within the framework of pragmatic competence. A descriptive qualitative approach was adopted, with data collected through a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) consisting of ten communicative situations. The participants were twenty intermediate-level students at Ma’had Al Imarat Bandung. The data were analyzed by integrating the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) model and Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory. The findings reveal that the dominant request strategy used by non-native speakers is the conventionally indirect strategy, particularly the query preparatory, which is consistently associated with negative politeness. In contrast, positive politeness strategies occur relatively infrequently. These results indicate that the selection of request and politeness strategies is strongly influenced by the Ma’had’s socio-cultural context, which emphasizes hierarchy and pragmatic caution. Therefore, this study recommends the explicit integration of pragmatic competence, particularly request and politeness awareness, into Arabic language instruction
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