Social Distance, Directness, And Cultural-Cognitive Orientations in Student Requests

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the impact of social distance on the level of directness in the request acts of American and Vietnamese students, while simultaneously providing a preliminary examination of the role of cultural-cognitive orientations regarding social relationships and hierarchy. Methodologically, data from 94 students (45 American, 49 Vietnamese) were collected via 6 Discourse Completion Task (DCT) situations and Likert scales, and subsequently coded according to the CCSARP framework. The main results indicate that social distance had a strong negative effect on the level of directness (p < .001). American students consistently employed conventionally indirect strategies, whereas Vietnamese students preferred direct utterances in close relationships and gradually shifted toward indirectness as social distance increased. The interaction of cultural-cognitive orientations did not demonstrate a statistically significant moderating role. The study concludes that social distance is the central contextual variable governing politeness strategies. Therefore, practical recommendations emphasize the need to focus on context-recognition competence in intercultural pragmatics pedagogy, while concurrently refining the measurement instruments for cognitive structures in subsequent research.