Pragmatic Competence in Requests of Thai Learners of Spanish

This present study aims to analyse the pragmatic competence in requests of Thai learners of Spanish by comparing the pragmatic competence performed by Thai learners of Spanish and Spanish native speakers. A multiple-choice discourse completion test (MDCT) in Spanish in different situations was employed to collect data from two groups of participants. The first group consisted of 30 fourth-year Thai students of Khon Kaen University majoring in Spanish while the second group had 30 Spanish native speakers. Making a request is one of the speech acts frequently used in everyday life. Requests are face-threatening acts because a speaker wants to convince a hearer to do something that is beneficial to the speaker. Different request strategies are employed in different cultures. In some cultures, performing a request increases the level of indirectness to protect a speaker’s face while in others, speakers need to reduce the level of indirectness to save the hearer’s face or to show a close relationship between the speaker and hearer. Despite many differences between Thai and Spanish cultures, no study about pragmatic competence in requests focusing on Thai learners of Spanish has been conducted. It is necessary for Thai learners of Spanish to have pragmatic competence by learning the appropriate politeness strategies in Spanish to avoid communication failures or misunderstanding.The findings of this study suggest that in formal situations, requests performed by Thai learners of Spanish significantly differ from requests performed by native Spanish speakers. On the contrary, requests performed by two groups of participants are rather similar in informal situations. The results of this study can show cultural differences between the Thai and Spanish languages.