THE ANALYSIS OF REQUEST STATEMENTS BY EFL LEARNERS: A SOCIOPRAGMATIC POINT OF VIEW

Pragmatics is basically concerned with the social and contextual factors that affect communication. Research into the pragmatic competence of foreign language learners has shown that pragmatic competence levels of learners and native speakers are quite different. While acquiring the language, native speakers of a language acquire abstract knowledge of social and functional rules. However, communication is not easy for L2 learners. Because even though they develop a sound knowledge of language rules, they may have difficulty in dealing with people’s intended meanings, assumptions, and purposes while communicating. The main aim of this study is to explore elementary and intermediate EFL learners’ sociopragmatic awareness in requests and to examine whether proficiency level and gender cause any statistically significant difference. The data were gathered by a reverse discourse completion test (R-DCT) from 25 elementary and 36 intermediate level learners. R-DCT included eight statements and participants were asked to write situations in which these statements might have been uttered. Participants’ responses were assessed in terms of three sociopragmatic variables: social power, social distance and imposition. The findings of the study revealed that while proficiency creates a statistically significant difference, gender does not cause a significant difference in learners’ sociopragmatic awareness. Participants with intermediate level proficiency were more successful than participants with elementary level proficiency in designating the targeted sociopragmatic factors in conversational situations. Teachers should be aware that they need to spend considerable amount of time and energy to enhance pragmatic competence through which learners can create and maintain effective communication.