THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK LITERATURE REVIEW

46 a theoretical, speculative and idealistic way of approaching imminent problems and handling everyday affairs. Practically, considering the participants in the interaction and what is actually happen in our everyday life, it is important to take a close attention to who interacts with whom and that those people share or do not share the same background of knowledge. Pragmatics helps us to see that knowledge owned by the participants may affect to the understanding on how the same words are possibly interpreted differently by different respondents. Thus, the pragmatic competence of the participants cannot be left behind. This thesis is a pragmatic study in which the researcher focuses on the use of the language by non-English learners, challenges that most of pragmatic studies take English learners as their research objects. It is worth discussing since non- English learners basically do not experience the same teaching and learning process and the English ones. As Ochs in Aijemer and Ruhlemann 2015:2 highlights that “the language user chooses a linguistic form variably according to the social situation, which is broadly conceived and includes such factors as speaker identity, relations to the hearer, activity type and the speaker stance”, by taking students from different background of fields study, the researcher investigates whether the distinction may occur or not. The appropriateness of participants in interaction refers to the notion of communicative competence. Allot 2010:33 defi nes “communicative competence as the ability to communicate in a language. This competence includes competence of grammatical forms of language and the ability to put forms of language use in communication”. Therefore, the communicative competence also comprises the PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 47 pragmatic competence of the users of English language, in this research is Medical and Law students, in different situational contexts. He further asserts that the competence is not merely considering the grammar and speech sound, but also covers the strategies for communicating in that language. In pragmatics, the competence also closely related to the interlanguage pragmatics term. According to Mey 2009: 1008, “interlanguage is a stage on a continuum within a rule-governed language system that is developed by L2 learners on the way to occurring the target language”. Recalling back that pragmatics is a study of language in use, it is often that people apply speech acts whenever they communicate. Moreover, when they come from different background or area of study fields, it is potential that they use language differently to share their wants and intentions. As Ariel 2010:39 states that people use linguistic forms to perform act. Since uttering something is not merely delivering information, yet focusing on acting through language, the most common speech acts embedded in daily interaction is requesting. Drew and Couper- Kuhlen 2014:1 stress: Requesting is one of the most basic and ubiquitous activities in social interaction. Whoever we are and whenever we live, whatever the language we speak, whatever work we do, whatever our status or ‘position’ in society, whatever domestic arrangements we have and generally whatever our circumstances, almost every day in our lives we ask someone to do something for us – we make a request. Through the pragmatic examination, we may notice that when we ask someone to do something, we put them on sort kind of obligation to be further accept and do whatever we request them for. Therefore, we need to select strategies when we make request to moderate our acts. Rue and Zhang 2008 suggest four modifications as the request strategies namely the openers, head acts, internal 48 modifications for the lexical or syntactical modifications and external modifications as supportive moves. These strategies are utilized to investigate the use of the request acts by non-English students of Batam University, specifically for Medicine and Law students. On the other hand, requests also always deal with politeness as the measurements of appropriateness of the acts used in making requests. As the instrument, the researcher employs DCT which has been widely known as the most commonly used instruments for the data elicitation method in pragmatics Felix- Brasdefer, 2008:59. At this point, the responses of the DCTs are the data which cover words, phrases, clauses, and sentences contain request acts. Based on these responses, the researcher finds they satisfy the openers, head acts, internal and external modifications as the students’ strategies in making requests. 49 Figure 2. The Researcher’s Theoretical Framework Pragmatic Study Pragmatic Competence Strategies and Modification of requests Factors underlie the choice of the strategies and modifications Interlanguage Pragmatics Speech Acts Openers Head Acts Internal modifications lexical and syntactical modifications Discourse Completion Tasks DCTs External modifications supportive moves Politeness Requests English for Medicine Law 50

CHAPTER III RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

This chapter is prominently centered on the design of the study, data, the instruments used for the data collection, as well as the data analysis and the trustworthiness. It starts with the description of the type of study, data and data source, and the instrument for the data collection. Further, it also presents the selection of the data and steps handled by the researcher for the data analysis. On the other hand, to gain the trustworthiness of this research, the result verification test is taking a place as the attempt to achieve the validity. Finally, it comes to the results interpretation of the data analyzed.

A. TYPE OF STUDY

Research is an activity that requires analytical and critical thinking for all of its stages. To this extend, as mentioned in the title, the research on requests strategies pattern done by the second language learners can be categorized as a pragmatic study. Pragmatic study allows to investigate the use of language by the users, in this case Medical and Law students, to carry meaning and intentions of saying something. This study utilized both qualitative and quantitative method as a mixed-method research. Sampathirao 2016:177 mentions “quantitative research methods are adopted from physical sciences that are designated to ensure objectivity, generalizability and reliability”. He further asserts that the strengths of quantitative 51 methods are that these methods procedure quantifiable and reliable result that are usually generalized to some larger population and are often most appropriate for comparative analysis. Meanwhile, on the other hand, Obendorf and Weinreich 2003 imply: Qualitative methods are ways of collecting data which are concerned with describing meaning rather than with drawing statistical inferences and qualitative methods lose on reliability they gain in terms of validity which provide a more depth and rich description. Moreover, Gorard 2 004 emphasizes that “one of the ways to give satisfactory evidence of its quality and its relevance is through quantitative research method”. Therefore, the researcher decided to apply mixed-method of quantitative to further support the qualitative findings of this request acts study. To emphasize, the combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches allow statistically reliable information obtained from the numerical measurement to be backed up by and enriched by information to provide a richer and contextual basis for interpreting and validating the results. Referring back to the pragmatic study, participants adjust the linguistic properties they employed to get the addressee done the thing they needed. It is not only the matter of directness or indirectness of the request form, but also choices of the linguistic units become matter. With a purpose to discover whether different fields of study affect the use of the linguistic elements in making requests, in this thesis, the researcher prefered to apply statistical technique called T-test. Bluman 2012 designates t- test as “a statistical technique to discover the relation of difference between two groups”. In other words, t-test is a simple statistical way to PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI