Resources for Responding to Requests in English

Responding to requests can be a complex and stressful area of language for people in their L1, let alone their L2. While some languages share similar expectations and expected responses to requests, there can also be competing pragmatic expectations between one's L1 and L2 that can further complicate this act. Is it okay to just say "No." if you want to refuse a request? Or will that get you in a tense situation and become a pragmatic failure? Below are a selection of resources we have gathered to help language educators when approaching this function in their teaching. While many of our gathered resources focus on teaching English, many contain reflection on these acts across languages and come from a multilingual perspective.

Beebe, L., Takahashi, T., & Uliss-Weltz, R. (1990). “Pragmatic Transfer in ESL Refusals.” In Robin Scarcella, Elaine Andersen, and Stephen Krashen (eds.), Developing Communicative Competence in a Second Language. Cambridge, MA: Newbury House.

This is a singular chapter within a larger book, but we found this small study to be an interesting inquiry into the pragmatic competence needed when refusing, particularly in one's L2, and the way that these pragmatics involved with refusing--such as face-saving, social distance, power, etc.--from one's L1 can transfer into one's L2. The complexity of transfer found in this regard was informative and could help language teachers by providing a window in to how this transfer can interact and change with different situational uses of refusals in one's L2, such as the varying occurrences of social distance and power and the changing dynamics surrounding this, particularly looking at Japanese and American English and Japanese learners of English.

Leech, G. N. (2014). The Pragmatics of Politeness, . Oxford University Press.

The sixth chapter of this book, titled Requests and Other Directives, is particularly helpful when looking for more information and guidance on the topic of requests in English. Subsection 6.5 was the section we found most useful for the subtopic that is the focus of this page, responses to requests. The author provides examples and discussion of positive and negative responses to requests, also called compliant responses and refusals respectively. This subsection is concise in identifying common response types and structures along with their assignment and discussion of the role of +/- politeness associated with the chosen response type.

Refusals. The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA): Pragmatics and Speech Acts. (n.d.). https://carla.umn.edu/speechacts/refusals/index.html

This website is a great resource for a large variety of research-based information centering on language acquisition, but we are particularly highlighting their section on the pragmatics of refusals. This section has subsections of examples and explanations (with sources) of refusals in American English, Arabic ,British English, Chinese, German, Japanese, and Spanish. They also have tips for teachers of a variety of language teaching contexts, and a research note section for a more detailed look at where they sourced certain sections, and finally a bibliography that has some great resources on this topic as well.