Learners ability to recgnize nonconventional speech acts : developmental pragmatic study

Abstract EN

Interlocutors often use different forms to express an intention and, at the same time, one single utterance can perform different actions.

Recognition of speech acts illocutionary forces may be an important component of the comprehension of conversational remarks (Holtgraves, 2001).

This study investigates EFL learners' ability to recognize nonconventional indirect speech acts and analyze their errors in this area.

Participants included 54 Yemeni students of English of two college levels.

They took a 29-item listening task .They were asked to identify the types of speech acts (requests, refusals, warnings, offers, advices, complaints) contained in specific heard utterances.

The results revealed no significant effect of grade level on their performance.

Speech act complexity, contextual clues, adopting bottom-up processing, treating each dialogue utterance independently, inability to relate meanings of utterances, and speech acts sharing similar features were the main reasons for their failure to recognize nonconventional indirect speech acts.