Offers and requests: performance by Japanese learners of English

This paper investigates how Japanese university students performed in English, when offering something to someone and when making requests, in situations where the addresser and the addressee are equal in status, and the degrees of closeness between them are different. The performances by the Japanese subjects were compared with those of native English‐speaking people. The major findings of this study include: (1) the Japanese subjects could not use appropriate expressions according to situations, even when they wanted to be more polite to the addressees; and (2) the expressions used by the Japanese subjects were too direct in most situations, and sounded rude. This meant that the Japanese subjects could not express their intentions in English, when they wanted to differentiate expressions under various situations. The results of this study revealed that the pragmatic competence of Japanese learners of English needs to be reinforced in their language instruction.