Özet:

This study aims to investigate interlanguage pragmatics in Turkish. For this purpose, a discourse completion questionnaire including four request situations wasgiven to 33 learners of Turkish at a university in Istanbul, Turkey as well as 45Turkish native speakers in two different programs at the same institution. The datawere then coded into request strategies. The length of requests and the number ofstrategies employed were also coded. The request strategies were analyzed usingthe chi-square test while the length and the number of strategies were analyzedusing the independent samples t-test. Results indicate that the two groups differedin head act strategies and downgrader strategies only in situation 3 while they differed in situation 2 through 4 in using supportive moves. In the length of therequests, number of supportive moves and the number of downgraders, the groupsdiffered in only one situation. This shows that although differences are observed,there is no drastic difference between native-Turkish speaking students and learners of Turkish as a second language. This shows that even after one academic yearin the target speech community, learners tend to choose strategies similar to thenative speakers of the target language. The effect of sojourn in the target community could be further researched by comparing learners of Turkish in the targetspeech community to those that learn Turkish outside of the target speech community after the same amount of time spent learning Turkish

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