The present study purports to examine the linguistic strategies of request acts that Korean learners of English use when making requests in English. This study compares these strategies with those used by the native speakers of English in order to find out what linguistic strategies Korean learners lack in their L2 and what factors influence their pragmatic request behavior. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the request speech acts by Korean learners of English as a foreign language. It is based on the analysis of the elicited response given to 120 subjects taking English as a supplementary course in three universities. The data was collected through written questionnaires based on Blum-Kulka(1984, 1989) with some supportive moves. Each of the valid responses were analyzed separately to identify the type of strategies used. The main aim is to find out the politeness strategies used and the frequency of their use. The main findings of the study revealed that the target subjects intended to use conventional indirectness strategies with constant tendency to use query preparatory and hedged performatives with more supportive moves. Among the three social variables, social distance and imposition have influence in varying the strategies of speech acts. Power does not influence the varying strategies of speech acts to Koreans but, partially influences the native speakers. Another finding concerns the various variations of Korean such as, sex, major, so on, and has influence in varying the strategies of speech acts. Among those of them, sex, age, major and the attitude of the scholor of English had an influence in using the strategies of the speech acts. However, an official record of an English Test and the influence of the speaker did not influence in varying the strategies of speech acts. Given the importance of pragmatic competence for effective communication, the study suggests that the second language (L2) instruction that focuses on developing learners'' pragmatic competence needs to be included in the L2 curriculum.