الرفض و الاعتذار في العربية لغة ثانية : مقارنة بين أداء طلاب متقدمين من غير الناطقين بالعربية و أداء الناطقين الأصليين

Abstract EN

This paper investigated learners’ pragmatic competence in Arabic as a second language.

It basically compared advanced learners’ and native speakers’ production of two speech acts, namely, refusals and apologies.

The participants in this study included twenty advanced learners of Arabic, from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, and twenty two native speakers of Arabic.

The data was collected by a means of Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs) which consisted of six situations for refusals and six situations for apologies.

Quantitative and qualitative approaches were used to analyze the data of the current study.

The results show that no significant differences were found between L2 learners and native speakers in terms of the use of refusal and apology strategies.

However, when examining the participants’ utterances qualitatively, the results indicate that noticeable variations were detected among L2 learners themselves when performing both refusals and apologies.

On the other hand, Arabic native speakers’ performance was very consistent.

Therefore, L2 learners fell short of Arabic native speakers norms.

Finally, the methodological and pedagogical implications drawn from this study were discussed.