Strategies, modification and perspective in native speakers’ requests: A comparison of WDCT and naturally occurring requests Maria Economidou-Kogetsidis * University of Nicosia, Cyprus Received 19 August 2012; received in revised form 15 March 2013; accepted 19 March 2013 Abstract The present study examines the extent to which written DCT requests approximate naturally occurring requests in a ‘standard’, service-encounter telephone situation with respect to the (a) degree of directness, (b) internal modification (syntactic and phrasal/lexical downgraders), and (c) request perspective. Results from the study revealed a picture with two sides: DCT requests and naturally occurring requests presented significant differences in a number of dimensions but at the same time they followed similar trends in terms of directness and lexical modification. Following the results, it was argued that the WDCT requests can, to a certain extent, approximate natural data and that WDCT data is therefore not without validity. It is warned, however, that findings from WDCT data should be treated with caution and as preliminary and that the use of a WDCT should be used alongside other research instruments and tested against other data through methodological triangulation. This will ensure greater validity and a better level of generalizability. © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: DCT; Naturally occurring data; Methodology; Requests; Directness; Modification 1. Introduction The validity of data collection instruments to be used for cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics research has been widely debated. More specifically, the research instrument most appropriate for eliciting L1 and L2 speech act data and politeness strategies has been a prominent topic of investigation for a number of studies in the field (Kasper and Dahl, 1991; Rose, 1994; Kasper, 2000; Yuan, 2001; Kasper and Rose, 2002; Billmyer and Varghese, 2000; Felix-Brasdefer, 2007a, 2010). The main data sources of speech act performance have been naturally occurring speech and elicited data via DCTs (discourse completion tests) and oral role-plays. Although naturally occurring speech acts are unanimously accepted as the most preferred data, collecting such natural data poses some challenges for the researcher. Naturally occurring speech acts are inherently difficult to collect and record as there is no guarantee that the speech act under investigation will occur at all or that enough tokens will be produced and collected since the researcher has no control over speakers’ production (Kasper and Dahl, 1991). Also, natural data very rarely allows for contextual variables to be controlled. Consequently, very few studies have relied exclusively on such authentic data for speech act analysis (e.g. Eisenstein and Bodman, 1993; Beebe, 1994; Boxer, 1996; Gass and Houck, 1999; Placencia, 1998; Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2005) some of which focused on discourse in institutional settings (i.e. Bardovi-Harlig and Hartford, 1993a,b). www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Journal of Pragmatics 53 (2013) 21--38 * Correspondence address: Department of Languages and Literature, School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, University of Nicosia, 46 Makedonitissas Avenue, 1700 Nicosia, Cyprus. Tel.: +357 22461566x105; fax: +357 22357665. E-mail addresses: kogetsidis.m@unic.ac.cy, mkogetsidis@cytanet.com.cy 0378-2166/$ -- see front matter © 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.03.014