This study looks at the pragmatic awareness of request strategies in English by Japanese native speakers and measures the rise in pragmatic awareness as a result of a series of specific teaching sessions. The subjects were 17 Japanese junior high school students at a Japanese school in Singapore. They were divided into three groups depending on their experience of residency, that is length of time spent residing in a target language environment. The subjects were given a Discourse Completion Task in two parts: part one included open-ended request and apology situations; part two contained multiple-choice request and apology acceptability judgements. The subjects were then given a series of six lessons aimed at raising their pragmatic awareness of request strategies.

Master of Arts (Applied Linguistics)