the realization of the english speech act of request among persian efl learners, russian efl learners and english native speakers: a cross-cultural study

In line with the cross-cultural speech act realization patterns (ccsarp) project, this study investigated realization of request strategies in informal and formal contexts of iranian and russian students learning english as a foreign language (efl). furthermore, the aim of this study was to investigate the values assigned to the two external context variables of social distance and social power on the frequency and quality of the request strategies across russian, persian and english languages. participants of this study were 84 learners. they responded to two role-play request situations. the responses were coded and were then analyzed. the findings of the study showed that persian and russian efl participants were affected by the social distance and social power of the interlocutor. due to their competency of the social power and social distance parameters, persian and russian participants produced different request strategies with each interlocutor and considered social status and distance appropriately. however, non-conventional indirect request strategies were chosen with dominant or unfamiliar interlocutor. the findings of the study also revealed that the most frequent strategy used by the two groups was conventional indirect request strategies. accurately, unlike russian and persian efl participants who rarely offered direct requests with uninterested interlocutors, english native speakers were more intended to use more direct strategies across various situations with dominant interlocutor. the findings also indicated that explanation-request; request-reason; apology-request were the most frequent semantic formulas used by the russian and persian efl participants and request-reason was frequent request strategy used by english native speakers.