Chinese Requests in Academic Settings

Requests can be made direct or indirect depending on the situations. A question-naire was created to test how Chinese students make requests in academic set-tings. Several strategies are available to make core requests in Chinese and as well various external and internal modifications are utilized. It has been con-cluded from the results of the questionnaire data that possibility strategy, inquiry strategy and command strategy are the most preferred strategies used in issuing requests. It provides a clue for Chinese instructors to reflect how to teach students to make appropriate requests in Chinese. Pragmatics has been defined as the study of how utterances have meanings in speech situations with speakers and hearers involved (Leech 1983). Utterance meaning is the main research object in pragmatics, whereas sometimes focuses on sentence meaning. For instance, from a pragmatic point of view, a statement like ‘It is hot today ’ can be a