PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE OF THE YEMENI EFL LEARNERS

Ahmed Qasem H. Al-Khadhmi, Mirza M. B., Abdullah Ali Al-Eryani

Abstract


The present study aimed at investigating the pragmatic competence of the Yemeni Non-Native Speakers of English (YNNSs) through examining their performance in the speech act of refusals. The study followed the qualitative comparative analytic approach. For the purpose of attaining the required data for this study, forty (YNNSs) and forty American Native Speakers (ANSs) of English were involved. The questionnaire used for collecting data from the participants was a written Discourse Completion Task (DCT), which was developed by Beebe et el. (1990), employed for collecting the data related to the use of refusal strategies by the two groups of participants in English. The data collected from DCT was analyzed by using a loading scheme adapted from Beebe et al. (1990). This study revealed that the Yemeni NNSs were not pragmatically competent enough in English. In spite of the similarity between the two groups in their use of refusal strategies, the differences between them were more apparent. The total number of strategies used by the American NSs was almost double those used by the Yemeni NNSs in all refusal situations. This study recommends that instructors should design contextualized, task-based, oral activities and integrating the intercultural aspects of language into ELT textbooks. 

 

Article visualizations:

Hit counter


Keywords


pragmatic competence, EFL learners, Yemen

Full Text:

PDF

References


Alcaraz, F. C., & Wreszinski, W. F. (1990). The Heisenberg XXZ Hamiltonian with Dzyaloshinsky-Moriya interactions. Journal of statistical physics, 58(1-2),45-56.‏

Al-Eryani, A. A. (2007). Refusal strategies by Yemeni EFL learners. The Asian EFL Journal, 9(2), 19-34.‏

Bach, K. (2004). Pragmatics and the philosophy of language. In L. Horn & G. Ward (Eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics (pp.463-487). Oxford: Blackwell.

Bardovi-Harlig, K., & Dörnyei, Z. (1997). Do language learners recognize pragmatic violations? Pragmatic versus grammatical awareness in instructed L2 learning. TESOL Quarterly, 32, 233-262.

Beebe, L. M., Takahashi, T., & Uliss-Weltz, R. (1990). Pragmatic Transfer in ESL Refusals. In Ghazanfari M., Bonyadi A., & Malekzadeh S. (2012). Investigating cross-linguistic differences in refusal speech act among native Persian and English speakers. International Journal, Islamic Azad University.

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Crystal, D. (2010). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, (3rd Edition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Crystal, D. (2010). Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language. Oxford University Press.‏

House, J. (2006). Text and Context in Translation. Journal of Pragmatics, 38(3), 323-337.

Kasper, G. (2000). Data Collection in Pragmatics Research. In H. Spencer Oatey (Ed.), Culturally speaking. Managing rapport through talk across cultures (pp.316-341). London and New York: Continuum.

Kasper, G., & Blum-Kulka, S. (Eds.) (1993). Interlanguage pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Kasper, G., & Dahl, M. (1991). Research Methods in Interlanguage Pragmatics. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 13(2),215-247.

Kasper, G., & Rose, K. R. (2002). Pragmatic development in a second language. Michigan: Black well.

Kasper, G., & Rose, K. R. (2001). Pragmatics in language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Leech, G. N. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. New York: Longman.

Levinson, S. (1983). Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mey, J. (2001). Pragmatics, an Introduction. United Kingdom: Black well Publishing.

Mey, J. (2006). Pragmatic Acts. In Brown & Keith (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nded.). Elsevier, Oxford.

Morris, C. H. (1938). Foundation of the theory of signs. In O. Neurath (Ed.), International encyclopedia of unified science, 1. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Olshtain, E. & Blum-Kulka, S. (1985). Degree of Approximation: Nonnative reactions to native speech act behaviour. In S. M. Gass & C. Madsen (Eds.), In put in second language acquisition (pp.303-325). New York, NY: Newbury House.

Taghizadeh, R. (2017). Pragmatic competence in the target language: a study of Iranian learners of English (Doctoral dissertation). University of Salford, Greater Manchester, England.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejlll.v5i3.281

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2021 Ahmed Qasem H. Al-Khadhmi, Mirza M. B., Abdullah Ali Al-Eryani

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The research works published in this journal are free to be accessed. They can be shared (copied and redistributed in any medium or format) and\or adapted (remixed, transformed, and built upon the material for any purpose, commercially and\or not commercially) under the following terms: attribution (appropriate credit must be given indicating original authors, research work name and publication name mentioning if changes were made) and without adding additional restrictions (without restricting others from doing anything the actual license permits). Authors retain the full copyright of their published research works and cannot revoke these freedoms as long as the license terms are followed.

Copyright © 2017-2023. European Journal of Literature, Language and Linguistics Studies (ISSN 2559 - 7914 / ISSN-L 2559 - 7914). All rights reserved.

This journal is a serial publication uniquely identified by an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) serial number certificate issued by Romanian National Library. All the research works are uniquely identified by a CrossRef DOI digital object identifier supplied by indexing and repository platforms. All the research works published on this journal are meeting the Open Access Publishing requirements and standards formulated by Budapest Open Access Initiative (2002), the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing (2003) and  Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities (2003) and can be freely accessed, shared, modified, distributed and used in educational, commercial and non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Copyrights of the published research works are retained by authors.