scholarly journals Disagreement: a speech act analysis and classroom implications

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (6) ◽  
pp. 24-35
Author(s):  
Panha Song

Disagreement has been widely regarded as one of the most interesting speech acts in EFL context since the way the speaker expresses her or his opposing view can affect the addressee’s self-image and view of the addressor. This article attempted to identify various strategies native speakers of English realized this speech act through a qualitative method by analyzing two sets of authentic data from two half-hour interviews. Next, it investigated the lack of emphasis on disagreement in EFL materials before offering possible suggestions to equip non-native learners of English with pragmatic competence to disagree effectively. The findings and recommendations had implications for EFL teachers, course designers, and materials developers in how and why speech acts and pragmatic competence should be emphasized in order to ensure that nonnative speakers of English could communicate effectively without being perceived as pragmatically inferior.

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-30
Author(s):  
Yaseen Alzeebaree

This study aims to examine Kurdish EFL university students’ development of L2 pragmatic competence by investigating their performance of the speech acts of permission. The methodology of this study was a combined research method, which comprises a quantitative and a qualitative method (mixed method). Total of 97 participants were involved in this research study. 83 (33 males and 50 females) were from four state universities and one private university in the Iraqi Kurdistan region and 14 were native speakers of English. A discourse completion test (DCT) was used to elicit the required data from participants. The study used convenience sampling for the participants because both native and non-native participants were selected on the basis of their availability. The data were coded and analysed quantitatively in terms of overall strategy use and strategy patterns. The findings revealed that there were differences in the frequency and percentages of strategies and semantic formulae in performing the speech act. KEFLUS tended to use more direct and explicit. There were more politeness and implicitness in NSE' behaviours in performing the speech act, which might have resulted from the lack of pragmatic competence of KEFLUS.


1993 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig ◽  
Beverly S. Hartford

This paper is a longitudinal study of the acquisition of pragmatic competence. Advanced adult nonnative speakers of English were taped in advising sessions over the course of a semester. Two speech acts, suggestions and rejections, were analyzed according to their frequency, form, and successfulness and compared with similar data gathered for native speakers. The nonnative speakers showed change toward the native speaker norms in their ability to employ appropriate speech acts, moving toward using more suggestions and fewer rejections, and became more successful negotiators. However, they changed less in their ability to employ appropriate forms of the speech acts, continuing to use fewer mitigators than the native speakers. Furthermore, unlike native speakers, they also used aggravators. We claim that these results may be explained by the availability of input: Learners receive positive and negative feedback from the advisor regarding the desirability and outcome of particular speech acts, but they do not receive such feedback regarding the appropriateness of the forms of such speech acts.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-82
Author(s):  
Davood Souri ◽  
Ali Merç

Twitter plays an important role in today’s world. Its role among politicians and those who are interested in politics is more obvious. Due to its importance and special characteristics such as character limits, it has drawn the attention of many researchers including linguists and ELT researchers. This study aimed to compare the perceptions of native and nonnative speakers in identifying speech acts in Donald Trump’s tweets. The subjects of this study were nine English native speakers and twenty nonnative English teachers who were Turkish citizens. Thirty- seven tweets of Donald Trump over the course of a week were selected and the participants were asked to identify the speech acts of the tweets based on the speech acts taxonomy by Searle (1976). The analysis of the data revealed that both native and nonnative speakers of English identified the speech acts of the large majority of the tweets very differently. These differences were partly due to lack of enough political as well as background knowledge and partly due to lack of contextual variables.


Author(s):  
Yehezkiel Adhi Nugraha

<p>People will not only use language for sharing message but also due to do an action. Through language, people will ask, promise, refuse, greet, invite, thank, and so on. The purpose of this research is to identify the speech acts preference used by Indonesian and Filipino non – native speakers of English via Facebook Messenger. Besides, to identify the similar or different of speech acts preference they used.</p><p>             The source of data are utterances of conversation in Facebook Messenger. The researcher applies documentation and an observation (reading the book and internet as the references) in collecting the data. After collecting the data, the researcher analyzes the data by focusing the speech acts theory. In order to support the evidence of the result, the researcher needs to describe and compare the high context-cultures and low context-cultures by Hall (1976) and also cultural dimension of Indonesia and Philippines by Hofstede.</p>The result of the analysis shows that the most speech acts preference used by Indonesian and Filipino non - native speakers of English is direct speech act. Similar and different types of speech acts are found. The similar speech act preferences are found in declarations and representatives. The different speech acts preferences are found in expressives, directives, commissives, direct, and indirect speech acts. The result of this research also shows that the communication of Indonesian and Filipino are included into low contex-cultures. It is contrary with the theory of Hall and Hofstede which shows that Indonesia and Philippines factually should be high context-cultures.


2014 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogna Brzezicha ◽  
Małgorzata Kul

AbstractThe paper reports the results of a study investigating vowel reduction in the speech of non-native speakers of English. The aim was to unravel the links between reduction and speech rate, phonetic training and gender. We hypothesized that (i) Polish speakers of English reduce vowels; (ii) they speak slower than native speakers; (iii) the higher the rate, the higher the reduction degree; (iv) speakers with phonetic training reduce less than those lacking it; (v) male subjects reduce more than the female ones. In order to realize these aims, an acoustic analysis of vowels was performed on 2 hrs 42 mins of speech produced by 12 Polish speakers of English. The subjects were di-vided into an experimental group consisting of 6 students of English and a control group with 6 speakers who had no phonetic training. The obtained results positively verify that non-native speakers reduce vowels and cast some doubts on whether they speak slower than native speakers. The role of rate and gender could not be established due to statistical and methodological issues. The group with no phonetic training outperformed the group which underwent phonetic training, pointing instead to the role of exposure and perhaps music training in acquiring native-like reduction patterns.


Author(s):  
Rehan Almegren

This study focuses on comparing the speech acts of native Arabic speakers of Saudi region and English speakers of America, which help depict the impact of the variables involved, namely status, setting, social distance and situation formality. This paper makes a significant contribution for future researchers, as it is of help to researchers in the speech act area specifically in terms of Saudi Arabic and American English. It will be also of help to those learning Arabic or English and those who teach it in these two countries. Thus, the outcome of this research will contribute to depict the differences and the similarities in the use of greeting strategies between two different groups of respondents from diverse linguistic and cultural domains. Data was collected using the discourse completion test (DCT), developed by Cohen, Olshtain & Rosenstien (1985). Fifty female respondents within the age group of 20-25 years were selected from each group to participate in research procedures. Although the inclusion of male respondents would have made the process complex, it would have provided with comparatively more accurate outcomes if managed properly. The findings showed that linguistic and cultural differences, variables of social distance, social status, settings and situation formality greatly influenced the decision-making of Saudi Native Speakers of Arabic and American Native Speakers of English, pertaining to their usage of greeting strategies as part of their speech acts. For example, differences can be observed between these two speakers in terms of their greeting strategies; American English speakers attach less significance to social and physical distance and hierarchy compared to Saudi Arabic speakers. Similarly, both the groups attach almost equal importance to their initiation words when greeting others. These differences and similarities help determine social status and the relationship between speakers. 


2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-158
Author(s):  
Una Cunningham

This study examines the English pronunciation of a group of Nigerian students at a university in Sweden from the point of view of their intelligibility to two groups of listeners: 1) native speakers of English who are teachers at the university; 2) nonnative speakers of English who are teachers at the university. It is found that listeners who are accustomed to interacting with international students do better than those who are not, and that native speakers of English do no better or worse than non-native listeners. The conclusion is drawn that locally useful varieties of Nigerian English may not easily be used as for wider communication and that students preparing to study abroad would find it useful to gain access to a more widely intelligible variety.


Author(s):  
Carmen Maíz-Arévalo

Disagreement has been relatively less studied than other speech acts such as requests or compliments, especially as produced by nonnative speakers of English. The present study aims to analyze the production of disagreement by an international group of Master students who use English as lingua franca in an online collaborative project. More specifically, the study tries to answer the following research questions: (1) does linguistic proficiency entail pragmatic competence? and (2), what is the effect of explicit instruction on pragmatic competence? To this purpose, two subcorpora (prior to and post instruction) were gathered by means of two online collaborative activities, rendering a total of 25,347 words. The analysis of the data reveals that high linguistic proficiency plays a crucial role in pragmatic competence. On the other hand, explicit instruction seems to benefit students to different extents, with intermediate B1 students improving their expression of disagreement and lower level students still remaining far from pragmatic and linguistic competence.


Author(s):  
Ahmed Qasem H. Al-Khadhmi ◽  
Mirza M. B. ◽  
Abdullah Ali Al-Eryani

<p>The present study aimed at investigating the pragmatic competence of the Yemeni Non-Native Speakers of English (YNNSs) through examining their performance in the speech act of refusals. The study followed the qualitative comparative analytic approach. For the purpose of attaining the required data for this study, forty (YNNSs) and forty American Native Speakers (ANSs) of English were involved. The questionnaire used for collecting data from the participants was a written Discourse Completion Task (DCT), which was developed by Beebe et el. (1990), employed for collecting the data related to the use of refusal strategies by the two groups of participants in English. The data collected from DCT was analyzed by using a loading scheme adapted from Beebe et al. (1990). This study revealed that the Yemeni NNSs were not pragmatically competent enough in English. In spite of the similarity between the two groups in their use of refusal strategies, the differences between them were more apparent. The total number of strategies used by the American NSs was almost double those used by the Yemeni NNSs in all refusal situations. This study recommends that instructors should design contextualized, task-based, oral activities and integrating the intercultural aspects of language into ELT textbooks. </p><p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0895/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-69
Author(s):  
Young-Kyung Min

The English language is considered to have the largest vocabulary in the world (Crystal, 2002). Educated native speakers of English are expected to know approximately 20,000 word families or 70,000 words (Nation, 2001); however, educated non-native speakers of English know less than one quarter of the native speakers’ vocabulary (Laufer & Yano, 2001). Nonnative speakers of English must increase their vocabulary knowledge in order to become successful in their academic endeavors in English-medium educational environments. A solid foundation of vocabulary knowledge is essential at every stage of the learner’s second language (L2) development. Regardless of the degree of the learner’s competency in grammar and pronunciation; one cannot have effective communication without sufficient vocabulary knowledge. 


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