PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE OF JORDANIAN EFL LEARNERS
This study investigates the Jordanian EFL learners' pragmatic competence through the production of the speech acts of responding to requests, making suggestions, making threats and expressing farewells. The participants of the study included 130 Jordanian EFL learners and native speakers who contributed with 2600 responses. Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was used as the instrument for data collection. The results revealed that there were similarities and differences in performing the strategies of speech acts. Moreover, the results of the data from the tests on speech acts showed learners' tendency towards using particular strategies, resorting to one strategy related to their grammatical competence, prefabrication, performing long forms, buffing and transfer. The results also were suggestive of the learners' lack of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic knowledge. The implications of this study are for language teachers to teach interlanguage pragmatics explicitly in EFL contexts to draw learners' attention to both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic features, pay more attention to these areas and allocate more time and practice to solve learners' problems in these areas. The implication of this study is also for pedagogical material designers to provide sufficient and well-organized pragmatic input.