This study aims to report the degree of agreement among 10 English-speaking instructors (i.e., native speakers of English) and 10 Japanese-speaking instructors of English as well as approximately 130 Japanese learners of English (the 1st year undergraduates) on appropriateness of requests with various pragmalinguistic patterns. The requests were extracted from a spoken learner corpus, and presented to the respondents online. It was observed that there was a big gap between the English instructors and Japanese students in assessing appropriateness of some of the requests.
This study aims to present whether it is possible to obtain agreements among ELT practitioners with different backgrounds and learners on appropriateness of requests with various pragmalinguistic patterns. First, the author extracted requests in shopping role plays in the National Institute of Information and communications Technology (NICT) Japanese Learner English (JLE) Corpus. Three typical situations were identified: (i) negotiating for a refund or an exchange of the purchased item, (ii) Asking for permission to test an item, and (iii) Expressing their intention to purchase a particular item.
The author (2017) conducted an online survey asking twenty English language instructors (including 10 native and 10 Japanese speakers) in tertiary education in Japan to evaluate requests extracted from the corpus in each situation, in terms of three different scales of appropriateness (i.e., "appropriate" as polite enough, "a little appropriate" as a little too polite or a little impolite, and "inappropriate" as too polite or very impolite). Situations (i), (ii), and (iii) contain 10, 6, and 8 expressions, respectively (e.g. "I was wondering if I could exchange it for something else" for (i), "May I try on this shirt?" for (ii), and "I'd like to buy a jacket". for (iii)). Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance, W, was calculated. A group of English-speaking instructors showed satisfactorily high agreements in Situations (i) and (ii) (i.e. 0.75 and 0.73), but that of Japanese instructors showed lower agreements (i.e. 0.56 and 0.41). The values on Situation (iii) were the lowest among English-speaking instructors (i.e. 0.47) and Japanese instructors (i.e. 0.38).
The author additionally collected responses on the same questionnaires from approximately 130 students at a private university at two different proficiency levels (i.e., novice and intermediate). As a result, a bigger gap was observed between the English-speaking instructors and the students in Situation (i) than (ii). For Situation (i), although they were produced by the CEFR B1 learners in the corpus, the expressions such as "So would you…?", "I think I have a right…", "I'll take… So please…", and "Why can't…?" were assessed as "inappropriate" by the instructors. However, the students' judgement was higher than the instructors: the novice learners rated them higher than the intermediate ones. For both situations, the instructors assessed the use of "want" as "a little appropriate", while the students rated it a slightly higher than the instructors did. On the other hand, a request with "I was/am wondering if I could" was highly assessed by the instructors than the students. The only item mostly agreed by the instructors and two student groups was the use of "can", which was assessed as "a little appropriate".
