Abstract:
This present work seeks to conduct a pragmatic study of request and
excuse formulas among 400 level learners in the Department of French at the
University of Cape Coast. The major objectives of this study are to identify the
sociolinguistic variables that influence the learners‟ choice of polite formulas,
to verify the strategies used by the leaners in realizing the speech acts of
request and apology and to look out for the pedagogical factors that are likely
to contribute to the learning of the polite markers in expressing a request and
an apology. This study uses Brown & Levinson‟s (1987) theory of politeness
as well as Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP) proposed
by Blum-Kulka, House & Kasper (1989). The data of this study was collected
through Discourse Completion Test (DCT) from sixteen level 400 French
students 8 being males and 8 being females. The analyses of our study show
that the students‟ choice of certain polite formulas is influenced by the
sociolinguistic variables. It also revealed that the learners have little
knowledge about the different strategies used in performing the acts of
apology and request thereby limiting them to a particular way of realizing
these speech acts. Our study further brings to the fore the role of teaching
pragmatics in a FLE class in the pragmatic performance of a FLE learner.
Finally, this study offers some pedagogical recommendations for educators to
implement in a FLE class in order to facilitate the learners‟ mastery of the
polite formulas in performing the speech acts of apology and request in
French.
