The aim of this study is to investigate the use of Mandarin Chinese request strategies by Taiwanese college students, the participants of this study were 52 males and 48 females, and the testing instruments include nine role-plays and Discourse Completion Task (DCT). The classification of request strategies proposed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) was used to analyze the collected data. The data indicate that the factor of gender and the gap in social power between requestors and requestees are not the main factors that affect college students’ use of request strategies, by contrary, the social distance between the two parties sometimes plays a primary role in influencing the use of the requestor’s request strategy.
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