Learners English Proficiency and their Pragmatic Competence of Refusal Speech Acts

Abstract

Abstract
The present study is an attempt to investigate the relationship between language proficiency and ?pragmatic comprehension of the refusal speech act among Iranian EFL learners. To this end, the ?Oxford Placement Test (OPT), as a proficiency test, was given to participants and they were ?divided into high and low level groups based on their proficiency scores. Then, a multiple-choice ?discourse completion task (MDCT) was given to both groups to elicit their pragmatic ?knowledge. The findings indicated that there was no significant ?difference between high and low groups in pragmatic comprehension. In other words, language ?proficiency was not the determining factor in the degree of pragmatic comprehension. Moreover, the results indicated that there was no correlation between learners language proficiency and pragmatic knowledge. Therefore, ?in order to have pragmatically competent EFL learners, they should be taught pragmatic functions and language norms of the target language in the language classrooms.
Keywords: Pragmatic comprehension, Speech acts, Refusal speech act, MDCT.