Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP)
Rasoul Mohammad Hosseinpur; Reza Bagheri Nevisi; Mohammad Bagher Mikhak; Abdolreza Lowni
Abstract
The question of whether, and to what extent, different measures of pragmatic knowledge mirror students' capabilities as represented in their authentic application of language has been an important consideration in the vicinity of interlanguage pragmatics. To examine the production of politeness ...
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The question of whether, and to what extent, different measures of pragmatic knowledge mirror students' capabilities as represented in their authentic application of language has been an important consideration in the vicinity of interlanguage pragmatics. To examine the production of politeness markers, as defined by House and Kasper's (1981) seminal work, this study compared and contrasted language learners' performance across four different measures of pragmatic competence: Written Discourse Completion Test, Oral Discourse Completion Test, Role-play, and Natural Methodology in an EFL setting. Furthermore, the requests made by 27 learners in natural situations and by means of WDCT, ODCT, and Role-play with similar characteristics were analyzed. The results revealed that hesitators enjoyed high prevalence in Natural Methodology and consultative devices and scope-stators were more popular in the WDCT, ODCT, and Role-play suggesting, regardless of some minor similarities, significant disparities between the three conventional data-gathering techniques and Natural methodology. The investigation exhibits that Natural Methodology might not necessarily be the ideal pragmatic measure to truly represent all politeness markers. WDCT, ODCT, and Role-Play could be more appropriate to draw on learners' explicit/declarative knowledge, though Natural methodology might be more advantageous to capitalize on learners' automated/procedural knowledge.
Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP)
Reza Bagheri Nevisi; Rasoul Mohammad Hosseinpur; Elahe Yazdankhah
Abstract
There have been a number of research concentrating on the request production of ESL/EFL, and native speakers. There have been some studies investigating the production of request speech act of EFLs and ESLs. However, no research has yet focused on the production differences of request speech act among ...
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There have been a number of research concentrating on the request production of ESL/EFL, and native speakers. There have been some studies investigating the production of request speech act of EFLs and ESLs. However, no research has yet focused on the production differences of request speech act among Iranian EFLs and ESLs in terms of internal and external modification devices. First, the participants were given Oxford Placement Test (OPT) to determine their English proficiency level and 95 learners were chosen out of 123 ESLs and EFLs to respond to the scenarios adopted from Schauer (2009). Second, the scenarios were given to the participants via email or an already-made GoogleDoc link of the scenarios. The results of the independent t-test revealed that Iranian ESLs outperformed their EFL counterparts. The results regarding request head act, internal and external modifiers demonstrated that ESLs mostly applied conventionally indirect request strategies while EFLs mostly tended to apply direct request strategies. It was also revealed that requests produced by ESLs were more native-like with no or few grammatical mistakes and that both EFLs and ESLs utilized external modifiers more than internal modifiers. This study implies that due and sufficient attention is to be paid to EFLs since they lack sufficient exposure to L2 and such impoverished pragmatic input might result in inappropriate applications of speech acts in general and request speech act in particular.
Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP)
Reza Bagheri Nevisi; Alireza Moghadasi
Abstract
Considering the indispensable role pragmatic knowledge plays in not only comprehending L2 materials, but also in making and maintaining proper communication, and the fact that Iranian EFL learners are primarily exposed to the target language through textbooks, this research intended to discern how frequently ...
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Considering the indispensable role pragmatic knowledge plays in not only comprehending L2 materials, but also in making and maintaining proper communication, and the fact that Iranian EFL learners are primarily exposed to the target language through textbooks, this research intended to discern how frequently and appropriately Politeness Markers (PMs), Speech Acts (SAs), and Language Functions (LFs) are being incorporated in newly-published Iranian high school English textbooks: Prospect and Vision Series. Furthermore, the study set out to investigate the possible relations between the level of the textbooks and the frequency of pragmatic components being included. To this end, 172 conversations of the aforementioned textbooks were thoroughly analyzed to determine the frequency of the PMs based on House and Kasper (1981) taxonomy, the frequency of SAs based on Searle's (1979) paradigm, and the frequency of LFs according to Halliday’s (1978) framework. Findings revealed that Committers were the most frequently-used PMs, Representatives and Directives were the most commonly-used SAs, and Informatives enjoyed the highest frequency among LFs. The results also indicated that these pragmatic components were not equally distributed throughout the conversations and no significant relationship existed between level of the textbooks and frequency of the pragmatic elements. In addition to the consciousness-raising dimension of the study, material developers might be able to appropriately represent and include pragmatic information into their materials. Moreover, teachers might also be able to amend and modify their adopted approaches to foreign language teaching and adjust them to accommodate potential learner styles and their preferences.