During the second half of the 20th century, there was a shift in focus in second-language-acquisition research from linguistic competence to communicative and pragmatic competence (Hymes 1972; Canale and Swain 1980; Canale 1983; Bachman 1990; Bachman and Palmer 1996; Usó-Juan and Martínez-Flor 2006). This resulted in a growing number of studies on speech acts in general. Motivated by a lack of studies on the speech acts of apology in conversations of Czech learners of English as a foreign language, my study aims to shed light on request and apology strategies used by Czech university students. The aim of this paper is to present the findings of a pilot investigation into the speech acts of apology and request. The first aim of the study is to compare two data collection techniques: the open-ended written discourse completion task (DCT) and oral production task (OPT). The second aim is to investigate the use of request and apology strategies by Czech learners of English. The findings suggest that both of the data collection techniques produced very similar data. In terms of requests, most respondents opted for a conventional indirect strategy. In terms of apologies, respondents opted for statements of remorse, offer of repair and account.