The Role of Pragmatic Awareness in Developing EFL Learners’ Realization of the Speech Act of Suggesting The Case of Third Year Students at mohamed khider Biskra University

Abstract

Abstract The present study seeks first and foremost to investigate the role of pragmatic awareness in the realization of speech act of apologizing. Nowadays, pragmatic competence has been recognized as an essential constituent of communicative competence. However, there is a total scarcity of pragmatic aspects and their teaching seems to be marginalized compared to other aspects of the target language. Consequently, learners find difficulties in using the language appropriately in different contexts by performing different speech acts. Our study examines students’ productions and perceptions of speech of apologizing. Throughout this study, we tackle the problem of students’ pragmatic unawareness and linguistic means used to realize the speech act of apologizing. The lack of pragmatic awareness affects seriously their performance. The aim of this study is to raise students’ pragmatic awareness to help them overcome communication problems when realizing speech acts. Therefore, we hypothesize that that if the students are pragmatically aware they will be able to produce the speech act of apologizing appropriately. In attempting to raise the students’ pragmatic awareness, we have designed a DCT (Discourse Completion task) that was addressed to the students. The results from the DCT have confirmed our research hypothesis. These results reveal that the majority of the students can make difference between different interlocutors and adapt their apologies accordingly. This awareness of pragmatic use could enable them to perform apologizing appropriately.