Background of the Study

1

CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION

The introduction provides information of the main idea whichconstructs the basic thought of the thesis writing. This section consists of background of the study, scope of research, research topic, research problems, research questions, purposes, the significance of the study, and the organization of the thesis.

1.1. Background of the Study

People live in a society and communicate using language to share feelings, thoughts, and anything in mind. Communication also happens in the environment of English Foreign Language EFL learners. According to Troike 2006:188, foreign language is a language that is not widely used in the learne rs’ social context, but it can be practiced for certain purposes, like for future travel, othercross-cultural communication situations, or for a school activity. The knowledge of foreign language is not only the grammatical rules, but also the pragmatic competence. Pragmatic competence is about sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic competence that should be understood in order to produce meaningful language Kasper and Roever, 2005:318. Sociopragmatic concerns more on a language use that is applied in social context, rather than pragmalinguistic that only concerns in linguistic resources and conveys meaning Leech, 1983:10-11. If the EFL learners cannot produce pragmatic utterances properly, there is a possibility of negative transfer. Yule 1996:47 states that speech acts are produced for performing actions by producing utterances. In English, there are several terms of speech acts: apology, complaint, compliment, invitation, promise, or request Yule, 1996:47. By the speech acts, the EFL learners have to know how to communicate properly and politely, as stated by Koike in Jalilifar and Hashemian2011: 790 that “...the speaker’s knowledge and use of rules of appropriateness and politeness which dictate the way speaker will understand and formulate speech acts”. One specific label of speech acts is request. Requests are produced when the speaker wantsthe hearer to do something. This speech act has relationship with politeness and face threatening act FTA, like what is stated by Brown and Levinson 1987. According to Brown and Leviso n’s politeness theory as cited in Jalilifar and Hashemian 2011: 790 “requests are Face Threatening Acts FTAs since a speaker is imposing hisher will o n the hearer.” It means that request has an influence to the hearer’s face which depends on how to enforce the needs.The imposition produced depends on the seriousness of FTA. Therefore, the speaker ’s utterance should be produced efficiently to decrease the effect of FTA on the hearer’s face Brown and Levinson cited in Jalilifar and Hashemian, 2011:790. Besides request has relationship with politeness, it also has connection with language and gender, as stated by Reiter 2000:33 that gender becomes one of the social factors that determines the imposition of politeness through speech act. Gender and politeness can be seen and evaluated through speech act, in this case requests. Before doing the research, the pre-research has been conducted in order to gain information about the request that is usually used by students of English Department academic year 20122013. It is found that the students cannot make appropriate request. Based on the result of the pre-research, this research discusses the request strategies that are employed by students of English Department in Jember Universityacademic year 20122013 in which assumption they have already got basic knowledge of English learning, for example reading comprehension, writing, speaking, listening comprehension, and grammar and structure. By having basic knowledge of English, it means that they are able to produce English utterances appropriately, for example request, compliment, refusing, etc. To know their ability in producing utterances, this research concerns with request as evaluation material. Therefore, this research is conducted because it explores whether there are any differences of request strategies produced by different gender based on relative power and social distance. Hopefully this research can give enlightment to the students of English Department as the language learners so that as the EFL learners, they know how to use English expressions appropriately, especially in term of request.

1.2. Scope of Research