Request strategies and external modification devices used by Thai female ESL speakers in the workplace

This study aimed to investigate the request strategies and external modification devices used by 20 Thai female ESL speakers in the workplace and explore the effect of social variables, namely, power, social distance, and the ranking of imposition on the participants’ requests. The three request directness levels with nine sub-items and the main concept of external modification devices by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) in the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) were used to analyze the data from a written discourse completion task that consisted of 12 scenarios in different social variables.The results found that query preparatory at a conventionally indirect level was the most frequently used by Thai female ESL speakers and the politeness structure consisting of past modal form was also highly used. In terms of external modification devices, the participants used devices in about four-fifths of the responses. The grounder device was the most frequently used, followed by disarmer, apology, and alerter. The power of the hearer was the main effect on the use of the directness level by the participants since they tended to use the indirect requests when the power of the hearer was higher. Furthermore, when the ranking of imposition was great and the relationship was distant, the participants tended to use external modification devices for mitigating request imposition.Questionnaire and interview data reveal that the respondents learned how to make appropriate requests in English mainly from learning in classes and experiences. It can be concluded that the female participants were aware of politeness when making requests in the workplace. However, as these results emerged from WDCT, their request utterances in real life can be possibly different.