The communicative situation and the speech act of the request in English language as a means of effective foreign language teaching

One of the assumptions of the theory of speech acts is that the minimum unit of human communication is not a sentence or an utterance, but “exercise of a certain kind of acts, such as statement, question, command, description, explanation, apology, gratitude, greetings, and so on". Many drawbacks of the modern theory of speech acts can be explained by its incompleteness and ongoing development. Prospects of application of the theory of speech acts are very diverse, so its importance for contemporary linguistics shouldn’t be underestimated.