The present study examines the requests and disagreements as performed by German working professionals (GWP) with a particular focus on the identification of pragmatic patterns in terms of (in)directness, external and internal modification; social variables and role rights and obligations; and L1-L2 transfer. The aim of this study is to identify learner needs for teaching pragmatic competence. Data was collected by means of an elicitation method involving both a Closed Role Play (CRP) and a Discourse Completion Test (DCT). The data collection tool comprises are 5 disagreements and 5 request scenarios designed according to GWP problems they encounter when requesting or disagreeing in their work related activities. The data were analysed in terms of Blum-Kulka, House and Kasper (1989), Weizman (1993) and Beebe and Takahashi (1989). The 125 GWP participants work in various companies and industries located in different regions of Germany. The participants are varied in their educational and professional backgrounds, gender, and age. For this study, only individuals who have regular work contact with Americans were chosen since they reflect the participants who attend seminars aimed at improving American-German work relations. The findings in this study point to the need for explicit instruction of the pragmatic dimension of language use in intercultural communication and English language classrooms. Requests were performed as hints with relative frequency, whilst disagreements were found to be inappropriately direct for the situations. The GWP tended to over-use external modification at the expense of internal modification, which rendered their speech acts brusque in tone. A notable finding is the relatively verbose supportive reasons and preparatory accounts which may be the result of GWP L1 communication value of clarity through information. The GWP showed a number of LI transfer that included syntactic, grammatical and lexical uses, all of which may negatively affect pragmatic meaning