Situational Variations in Request and Apology Realization Strategies among International Postgraduate Students at Malaysian Universities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<p>The present study attempted to describe the request, apology, and request mitigation strategies utilized by international postgraduate students in confronting different situations. In addition, it examined the effects of the situational factors of social distance, power, and imposition on the students’ choice of request and apology strategies as well as the modifications in requests. Another objective has been to categorize the difficulties students face in the production of the speech acts. One hundred and thirty international postgraduate students majoring in different fields voluntarily participated in this study. A Written Discourse Completion Task Questionnaire (Liu, 2005) and semi-structured interview were utilized for data collection procedure. The results of the questionnaire illustrated that the participants made use of IFID strategy for apologies and conventionally indirect expressions (Preparatory questions) for requests more frequently than other strategies. Moreover, the situational factors of social distance, power and imposition did not affect the participants’ choice of request and apology strategies but they had some influences on the use of mitigating strategies in different situations. Regarding modifiers, the students opted out external modifications (66.6%) more than internal modifiers (33.3%). Among the external mitigation types, “please” with 21% and grounders with 25% respectively have been utilized more than other external mitigation types. Finally, the results of the interviews indicated that the difficulties that students face in the production of the speech acts were grammar, expression, vocabulary and structure. This study has some implications for second language acquisition research and intercultural communication.</p>
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".