One of the most frequently occurring speech acts across cultures, and
one of the most researched as well, is the request. Blum-Kulka, House, and
Kasper (1989) devoted a large portion of their edited volume to studying the
pragmatics of the request speech act. Through their research, they
The Instruction of E-mail Pragmatics to Second Language Learners 145
developed a process for designing appropriate data elicitation tests and
created a detailed coding manual to assist in analyzing discourse data.