The influence of Gender on Requests Used by Iraqi Undergraduate Students in the Academic Setting

Abstract

The current paper seeks to investigate how gender influences the use of requests among University students. The paper's aim is to examine the use of requests by Iraqi male-female undergraduate students of English in the academic setting. A written Discourse Completion Task questionnaire was used to gather data from 20 male and 20 female undergraduate students of English identified via random sampling. Schuaer's (2009) taxonomy was employed to analyse data. The findings indicated that females used more conventionally indirect requests than males in the academic setting. In this regard, they would inform English language instructors on teaching the most appropriate strategies of polite requests in the academic discourse.