A cross-cultural and interlanguage study of head-acts in the realization of requests and refusals by native speakers of Spanish and English and by university EFL learners

Abstract

Objetives: to describe the way in which native speakers of English and native speakers of Spanish realize the speech acts of request and refusal in their respective mother tongues; to determine the extent to which the pragmatic norms of the L1 (Chilean Spanish) influence the strategies and sub-strategies that formal learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) at different proficiency levels use when producing the speech acts of request and refusal in English.