The impact of pragmatic consciousness-raising tasks on EFL learners’ speech act strategy use

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 570-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rasoul Mohammad Hosseinpur ◽  
Reza Bagheri Nevisi
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Strategy Use ◽  
Consciousness Raising ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
The Impact

Abstract Although there are growing attempts to equip learners with strategies in the ESL/EFL classroom, there has not been much effort to implement strategies to assist learners in the learning of speech acts (e.g., Cohen & Ishihara, 2005). This study investigated the impact and effectiveness of instruction on EFL learners’ use of speech act strategies. A group of 131 Iranian undergraduate students were instructed through deductive consciousness-raising (C-R), inductive C-R, and L1-based C-R tasks for seven weeks. The results obtained through Cohen and Ishihara’s (2005) speech act strategy inventory indicated that instruction had a significant impact on participants’ utilization of speech act strategies. It also came to light that the learners were generally receptive to deductive and L1-based pragmatic C-R tasks. The findings suggest that pragmatic C-R tasks and especially L1-based tasks are effective means for applying strategies to supporting learners in the acquisition of speech acts.

scholarly journals Cross-Sectional Study of Refusal Speech Act Used by Iraqi Undergraduate Students

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 166-173
Author(s):  
Hutheifa Y. Turki ◽  
Juma’a Q. Hussein ◽  
Ahmed A. Al-Kubaisy
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Cross Sectional Study ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Cross Sectional ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Proficiency Level ◽  
Arabic And English ◽  
Refusal Strategies

This paper is conducted to investigate how Iraqi EFL learners refuse different speech acts across different proficiency levels. It aims to examine the most appropriate strategies used by 2nd year students of English as compared to those of 4th year when refusing their interlocutors' invitation, suggestion, and offer. WDCT questionnaire was used to collect data from 40 Iraqi undergraduate students of English: 20 2nd year and 20 4th year. Adopting Beebe et al.'s (1990) theory of refusal, data collected was analyzed quantitatively using statistical analysis. The findings revealed that the 2nd year students of English were more frequent in using direct refusals than their 4th year counterparts. This means the latter were more aware of using refusals politely than the former. On the other hand, the findings showed that 4th year students more frequent in their use of indirect refusal strategies that the 2nd year students. This indicates that the EFL learners of low proficiency level might not bridge the gap between the pragmalinguistic strategies and the grammatical form of the target language. This means that they were not pragmatically competent of the use of the appropriate pragmalinguistic strategies. This implies that the 2nd year students need to pay more attention to pragmatics and use their refusal strategies appropriately. Thus, the paper recommends conducting further research on the use of refusal speech act in Arabic and English.

scholarly journals The Impact of Raising Awareness of the Speech Act On Speaking Ability across Gender and Proficiency Level

HOW ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 93-111
Author(s):  
Kobra Ghayebi ◽  
Parisa Farrokh
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Traditional Teaching ◽  
Control Groups ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Proficiency Level ◽  
Raising Awareness ◽  
Awareness Raising ◽  
Males And Females ◽  
The Impact

The present study intended to investigate the possible effects of speech acts strategies on Iranian beginner and intermediate EFL learners’ speaking ability. The first step in conducting this research was the administration of QPT as the homogenizing tool. It was administered to 180 beginners and intermediate EFL learners. After analyzing the results, 80 males and females as starters and 80 males and females as intermediate subjects were chosen. Then, the beginner and intermediate EFL learners were randomly divided into control and experimental groups (including 40 beginner male and 40 female EFL learners in each class). Next, a pretest of speaking was administered to all the participants and the experimental groups received speech act role play as treatment. However, the researcher did not use any treatment of speech acts in control groups. After ten sessions, the posttest was administered to all participants. The findings suggested that awareness raising on speech acts resulted in a better speaking ability as compared to the simply traditional teaching of speaking for Iranian intermediate and beginner EFL learners. Additionally, intermediate EFL learners’ achievement in speaking was not in line with the beginner EFL learners’ achievement in the corresponding group. Finally, it was found that gender does not interact with awareness raising on speech acts in such a way as to produce a statistically significant effect on the beginner and intermediate EFL learners’ speaking ability.

scholarly journals The Impact of Different Output-based Task Repetition Conditions on Producing Speech Acts among Iranian Advanced EFL Learners

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 1541 ◽  
Author(s):  
Parisa Etemadfar ◽  
Ehsan Namaziandost ◽  
Reza Banari
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Task Repetition ◽  
Data Input ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Efl Students ◽  
Awareness Raising ◽  
Group 2 ◽  
The Impact

This examination inspected the effects of different output-based task reiteration conditions with respect to producing EFL students' speech acts. Three groups were incorporated into this investigation: (1) the explicit task-repetition (ETR) group, (2) the implicit task-repetition (ITR) group, and (3) the no-input task repetition (NTR) group. All the three groups occupied with the reiteration of output generation tasks. However, before the second execution of the task, the ETR, ITR, NTR groups received input combined with metapragmatic data, input combined with an awareness raising task, and no information separately. The outcomes demonstrated students' exhibition was factually huge from the pretest to the posttest in the ETR and ITR groups, however not in the NTR group. Besides, the analysis of contrasts over the groups in the posttest uncovered the predominance of the ETR over the ITR and NTR groups. The discoveries suggest that output-based task repetition with input can advance EFL students' speech act production.

scholarly journals Formal and Informal Russian Invitation: Context and Politeness Strategies

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 994-1013
Author(s):  
Gayane Rubenovna Vlasyan ◽  
Irina Vladimirovna Kozhukhova
Keyword(s):  
Discourse Analysis ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Politeness Theory ◽  
The Social ◽  
Politeness Strategies ◽  
The Impact

Invitation is a speech act which is perceived differently across cultures. Understanding the pragmatics of invitation requires knowledge of the notion of politeness and politeness strategies which comprise culture specific elements. Politeness is realized in various discourses, social contexts and speech acts. The purpose of the study is to identify politeness strategies in Russian invitation in formal and informal contexts in three age groups and see how they correspond to the understanding of politeness in Russian communicative culture. The empirical data for the study were obtained through discourse completion tests with 101 participants (issuers of the invitation) of different age and social status as well as through ethnographic observation. The research is based on Discourse Analysis and Politeness Theory (Brown & Levinson 1987; Larina2009, 2015; Locher 2006, 2013; Leech 2014; Mills 2003, 2017; Sifianou 1992; Terkourafi &Kadar 2017; Watts 2003, among others). We used discourse analysis to analyze the impact of the social and cultural context on the performance of invitation, the descriptive method which was used to analyze the pragmatic functions of invitation, as well as contextual interpretation of this speech act and the method of quantitative data processing. The study revealed some differences between a formal and informal invitation concerning politeness strategies and linguistic means of its expression. It also showed that in Russian culture issuing an invitation is not perceived as a face threatening speech act; in the analysed social contexts the preference is given to direct invitation, and the inviter’s imposition, as a rule, is perceived positively. The results contribute to a better understanding of Russian politeness and communicative style and can be implemented in intercultural pragmatics, intercultural communication and SL teaching.

scholarly journals Impact of Integrating Task-Based Learning and Functional Approach to Empower Learners’ Communicative Competence

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-54
Author(s):  
Tri Nguyen ◽  
Trang Xuan Phuong Dao
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Teaching Method ◽  
Communicative Competence ◽  
Tertiary Education ◽  
Functional Approach ◽  
Traditional Teaching ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Communicative Functions ◽  
Post Test ◽  
The Impact

Enhancing EFL learners’ communicative competence is a time-taking process to reach certain levels of interacting with different communication participants. However, in the tertiary education in Vietnam, traditional teaching approach with the task-based learning does not thoroughly focus on the language use but on the strategies to perform the tasks. Hence, the functional approach has been applied to boost learners’ awareness of their language delivery thanks to communicative functions and notions. The new mode of teaching concentrates on what communication participants desire to convey and why they make use of those speech acts. This paper aimed to explore the impact of the integration of task-based learning and the functional approach, and learners’ perspective towards the implementation of such approach combination. With the application of the mixed method of qualitative and quantitative approaches, the data were collected via a pre-test and a post-test, survey, and 32 interviews with the participation of 100 students whose major is Business Administration at a university. The findings reveal that adding the functional approach to the existing teaching method could enhance students’ overall speaking competence, especially their fluency and discourse management. Additionally, the application of the functional approach received positive feedback from the learners.  

scholarly journals Speech Acts across Cultures: A Comparative Study of Chinese and Pakistani Students’ Request and Politeness Strategies

sjesr ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Amina Shahzadi ◽  
Abdul Ghaffar Bhatti ◽  
Munir Khan
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Social Distance ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Chinese Students ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Politeness Strategies ◽  
Request Strategies ◽  
Esl Learners

The examines are the different request strategies in English used by Pakistani and Chinese students according to social distance and power of interlocutors. Data comprises students from Pakistan and China enrolled in an undergraduate program at International Islamic University Islamabad, Pakistan. Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper's (1989) taxonomy of request strategies is taken as a theoretical framework to compare the request speech act patterns of Pakistani and Chinese students. This study analyzed the request speech act in terms of head act strategies used by participants. Blum-Kulka et al. (1989) categorized the request speech act into three request strategies i.e. direct, conventionally indirect, and non-conventional indirect strategies. The study identifies similarities between Pakistani ESL learners and Chinese EFL learners in making use of mood derivable as the preferred strategies for making requests in situations of different social distance, power, and familiarity between the interlocutors.

Strategy choice and the target language

1995 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 169-182 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia White
Keyword(s):  
Undergraduate Students ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Cognitive Strategies ◽  
Verbal Report ◽  
Strategy Use ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Teaching Methodology ◽  
Four Dimensions ◽  
Language Courses ◽  
The Impact

Abstract This paper compares the strategies used by a group of English native speakers to develop competence in Japanese, a non-cognate language, and in a more familiar language, French. The participants were undergraduate students enrolled in both French and Japanese language courses. A verbal report procedure, the yoked subject technique, was used to gather data on strategy use by learners as they worked with target language materials. The data was analysed according to four dimensions of strategy use: metacognitive, cognitive, social and affective. The results indicated that the cognitive strategies learners used when learning Japanese diverged from those they used for learning French. The learning of Japanese was characterised by the use of repetition, writing out, and translation, with limited use of resourcing and no elaboration or inferencing strategies. The discussion of the results addresses the issue of the impact of language teaching methodology on cognitive strategy use, the effects of which cannot be readily separated from those of the structure of the target language.

Speech Act Theory and Communication Modeling

2011 ◽  
pp. 577-583
Author(s):  
Lewis Hassell
Keyword(s):  
Text Mining ◽  
Computer Security ◽  
Group Work ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Electronic Communication ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
General Will ◽  
Simple Computer ◽  
The Impact

Since the early 1980s there has been an interest in linguistics in general and speech act theory in particular in CSCW, HCI, MIS, and IS modeling in general. The reason for this is simple—computer and information scientists discovered that most work is group work and most group work occurs via language. Winograd and Flores (1986) popularized the use of speech act theory, especially the Searlian variety, for modeling electronic communication and collaboration. However, what one finds if one looks closely is that we have taken the easy road when dealing with language. There are a large variety of speech acts that we ignore when analyzing language, particularly when using speech act theory. Why this is so, the impact on tool-creation, and possible remediation of this problem will be discussed. The importance for such areas as e-collaboration, as well as text mining, computer security, and computing in general will be emphasized.

Learner background factors and learning of second language pragmatics

2014 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carsten Roever ◽  
Stanley Wang ◽  
Stephanie Brophy
Keyword(s):  
Poisson Regression ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Length Of Residence ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Background Factors ◽  
L2 Pragmatics ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Significant Factors

AbstractLearner background factors have been shown to affect learning of L2 pragmatics, which has been demonstrated especially for proficiency and length of residence. However, these factors have generally been investigated individually, not allowing conclusions as to their relative contributions. In this study, we use Poisson regression to investigate the effect of proficiency, length of residence, gender and multilingualism on learners' comprehension of implicature, recognition of routine formulae and production of speech acts in English. 229 ESL and EFL learners completed a web-based pragmatics test with 12 items per section. We found that only proficiency significantly affected implicature comprehension, length of residence and proficiency were significant factors in the recognition of routine formulae, and proficiency and gender significantly impacted speech act production. Although the effect of proficiency in our study is far greater than for any other background factor, we caution against overemphasizing its importance to learning of pragmatics overall.

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