Investigating the Pragmatic Awareness of EFL Students in Using the Speech Act of Apology

Abstract

Successful learning of EFL entail not only knowledge of its rules, but also appropriate application of these rules and norms of use in real contexts. To express the speech act of apology, as an aspect of language in use, learners need to be aware of the strategies used and the social factors involved in the production of appropriate acts in various communicative situations. The present study had three aims. First, to diagnose M1 students‟ pragmatic awareness in using the speech act of apology. Second, it attempted to investigate the different strategies used by students to express apologies in different communicative situations. Last, it sought to explore the teachers‟ practices adopted to raise their students‟ pragmatic awareness. It was hypothesized that if M1 students have the required pragmatic awareness, they will use various ways and expressions to produce the speech act of apology appropriately. In order to test this hypothesis, two research tools were used; a questionnaire designed for teachers, and a written discourse completion task administered to M1students at the department of English at Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia University. The findings revealed that M1 students faced a difficulty in using their pragmatic knowledge to produce appropriate apologies in different contexts. Hence, they lacked awareness of the pragmatic norms of using apology. Data obtained showed that the most frequent strategies used by students were „the expression of apology‟ and „giving explanation‟. Teachers, on their part, used task repetition, role-plays and classroom discussion as techniques to raise their learners‟ pragmatic awareness. Accordingly, it was recommended for teachers to give pragmatics its due share in their teaching curriculum through adopting new strategies for explaining the different norms of English use and raising students‟ awareness