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Speech is an act undertaken to realize some communicative purposes. Austin (1955) classifies speech acts into three categories: a locutionary act (what a speaker says); an illocutionary act (what a speaker intends); and a perlocutionary act (what a hearer does).
Persuasion is usually defined as a verbal act conducted with an “attempt or intention of one party to change the behavior, feelings, intentions or viewpoint of another by communicative means” (Lakoff, 1982, p.28). A speaker is required to have a clear intention to make a hearer do something (illocution), choose appropriate words and expressions and say them (locution), and make a hearer do something (perlocution).
When persuading someone, a speaker needs to be firm and tough, but s/he also needs to be polite and avoid threatening the “face” of a hearer (Brown and Levinson, 1987). If a speaker orders a hearer to do something, a hearer’s face is threatened, and persuasion would end in failure. This suggests that a speaker has to sometimes adopt indirect approaches to persuade someone. As Searle (1969) explains, a speaker can express two or more meanings at the same time. When someone says, “It’s hot here,” a hearer may open the window. In this case, the primary illocutionary act (to request a hearer to open the window) is performed by the secondary illocutionary act (to make a statement about the temperature).
The act of persuasion, which can be a highly demanding communicative task in terms of pragmatics and sociolinguistics, as well as speech acts in general, have not been taught appropriately in foreign language classrooms (CALRA, n.d.). Researchers need appropriate data to discuss the linguistic features of L2 learners’ persuasion skills and think about the effective methodologies needed to teach them.