Speech acts in classroom teaching : Iraqi EFL college students socio-pragmatic deviation in producing expressives

الملخص EN

It has been observed that Iraqi EFL college students are often found to deviate from the sociocultural norms and features when they are required to produce certain spoken situations involving the use of expressive speech acts of apology and condolence.

Their speeches and responses do not match those of native speakers, and thus, they seem awkward or refer to certain spoken situations other than those required in the communicative process or interaction.

A ten-item production test (of apology and condolence) is administered to 50 Iraqi EFL 4th year students of the College of Arts, Al-Mustansiriyah to identify their socio-pragmatic deviation in the use of apology and condolence.

Responses to the test have been collected and analyzed.

The study concludes that negative trans transfer of L1 socio-pragmatic knowledge is the main characteristic that EFL Iraqi students resort to when handling these speech acts.

Socio-pragmatic deviation or failure occurs because they are linguistically unaware of the conventions and resources used in the target language; therefore, their performance is a non-native one.

Further, lack of syntactic and semantic knowledge is an influential factor in producing certain spoken situations of the expressive speech acts of apologizing and condoling.