ASSESSING TANZANIAN EFL LEARNERS’ SOCIAL PRAGMATIC PROFICIENCY

This study assessed the proficiency of Tanzanian EFL learners at social pragmatics level. 50 secondary school EFL learners in secondary schools were involved in the study, 25 from a rural secondary school in Kilimanjaro region and the other 25 from an urban school in Dar es Salaam region. Data were gathered using a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) which consisted of six speech events. In each event they were requested to imagine they were participants in the events in which they were performing particular speech events of expressing displeasure, giving administrative directives and in ordering at a restaurant, advising someone who is in emotional difficulties, showing courtesy and, lastly, communicating refusal. The responses for each speech event were arranged in recurrent forms of locutionary acts and frequencies were computed for each locutionary act and analyses were based on the range from the most appropriate and polite to the most likely or potentially infelicitous illocutionary acts. The findings revealed that EFL learners in under study had various ways of executing social language engagements. The majority, however, seemed to fail to link the illocutionary force and locutionary act, resulting into either impoliteness of total infelicity of the illocutionary act. It was suggested that teachers be trained into proficiency based instructions so as to make their learners true communicants using English rather than making half-baked pseudo linguists who claim to know rules of Grammar of English but cannot communicate using the language.