The Impact of Pragmatic Awareness on EFL Learners' Oral Communication: A Case Study of Male Students Majoring in English, Taif University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia(2016)

Abstract

Pragmatics is derived from Greek word pragma whichmeans action, doing, factual real,pragmatics is a subfield of linguistic which deals with the contextual meaning. This study aims at investigating the impact of pragmatic awareness on EFL learners' oral communication. Also aims to sanitize EFL learners toissues of cultural differences, identify techniques and strategies needed for effective and successful requesting, complaining and refusal. The study adopted the descriptive analytic method.A Discourse Completion Test and questionnaire are the tools used to collect data for this study For data analysis the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) is used focused on three sets of speech acts, which are request, complaint and refusal. The researcher has adopted a within-subject design experiment to conduct the study. The sample of the study includes (20) students majoring in English and 46 EFL teachers chosen randomly fromTaif University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia during the first term of the academic year(2016-2017). The Discourse Completion Test was designed for the students and was also distributed to eight English native speaker teachers at English Language Centre, Taif University, their responses were used as modal responses. Whereas, the questionnaire was designed for the EFL teachers. The Discourse Completion Test was administered twice, before the training programme(treatment) and after the training programme and their responses were compared to the native speakers' of English. As result of the analysis,that EFL learners tend to use direct strategy in case of request, complaint and refusal before the treatment, which is different from the native speakers' of English. In contrast, it is found that after the treatment the students tend to use the indirect strategy, which sounds more polite and tactful similar to the native speakers' of English. The study ends up with some theoretical and pedagogical implications. It is demonstrated that EFL learners may fall back on their cultural background when performing request, complaint and refusal strategies. On the pedagogical level.In the light of findings these the study recommended that EFL learners should always be made aware of the pragmatic differences between Arabic and English and that an appropriate Arabic request, complaint or refusal in a given situation might not be appropriate in the English in the same situation.