Email this article Learner’s 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.
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.
Save to Mendeley
Full Text:
PDFDOI: https://doi.org/10.33508/bw.v3i1.677
