English language teaching
Mohammad Ahmadi Safa; Moneer Jafari
Abstract
One important aspect of pragmatic competence is the ability to comprehend and/or produce speech acts appropriately in different contexts. The acquisition and use of such an ability by non-native speakers of a language has been a major research line in interlanguage pragmatic competence (ILP) studies. ...
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One important aspect of pragmatic competence is the ability to comprehend and/or produce speech acts appropriately in different contexts. The acquisition and use of such an ability by non-native speakers of a language has been a major research line in interlanguage pragmatic competence (ILP) studies. Among different speech acts, the speech act of thanking is one of the most recurring acts, which has been comparatively less under the spotlight of ILP researchers. The purpose of this study is to explore how Iranian EFL learners express their gratitude and what thanking strategies they use in 14 different thanking situations. For this purpose, data were collected from 59 Iranian female advanced EFL learners through Written Discourse Completion Tasks (WDCT). Quantitative and qualitative analyses of data demonstrated a variety of thanking strategies were used by the participants in different thanking situations; however, the direct expression of gratitude without any preceding or succeeding complementary expression was the most frequently used strategy. Moreover, the diversity of different thanking strategies were almost similar in different thanking situations. The obtained results might imply that Iranian EFL learners need to be made more sensitive to both less direct and a wider variety of thanking speech act realization strategies.
Mohammad Ahmadi safa; Mohammad Hadi Mahmoodi
Volume 4, Issue 10 , March 2013, , Pages 1-26
Abstract
Second language learners often develop grammatical competence in the absence of concomitant pragmatic competence (Kasper & Roever, 2005) and the exact nature of the relationship between the two competences is still indistinct and in need of inquiries ( Bardovi-Harlig, 1999; Khatib & ...
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Second language learners often develop grammatical competence in the absence of concomitant pragmatic competence (Kasper & Roever, 2005) and the exact nature of the relationship between the two competences is still indistinct and in need of inquiries ( Bardovi-Harlig, 1999; Khatib & Ahmadisafa, 2011). This study is a partial attempt to address the lacuna and aims to see if any relationship can be found between English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ lexico-grammatical and interlanguage pragmatic competences and if such a relationship is found, whether the gender variable affects it or not. A group of 110 male/female senior university EFL students took a standardized lexico-grammatical proficiency test and a researcher made and validated multiple choice pragmatic discourse completion task test including four speech acts of disagreement, scolding, request and complaint at four levels of formality and familiarity. The results indicate that there is a positive correlation between the learners' lexico-grammatical and pragmatic competences. Furthermore, the correlation is stronger for female EFL learners than the male participants though the pragmatic competence level of the male and female participants was not significantly different. The results imply that grammatical competence is not in itself sufficient for the EFL learners' pragmatic competence but it can definitely constrain the development of interlanguage pragmatic competence
