چکیده:
This study attempted to investigate the effect of bilingualism on pragmaticawareness and development among Iranian Turkish/Persian EFL learners. Data werecollected through a personal profile questionnaire with questions about theparticipants’ language background and a WDCT with 10 situations to determine theextent to which the bilinguals demonstrated their pragmatic awareness of requests.They were to read the situations and assess whether they realized the(in)appropriateness of the speech acts. For inappropriateness, they were also askedto explicate their selections and provide appropriate alternatives. Responses wereanalyzed according to 3 social factors of power, distance, and degree of impositionwith the assumption that the more references to these factors, the morepragmatically aware the participants. Alternatives were coded according to thecoding scheme of CCSARP. Results showed that none of the groups outperformedthe others in their perception of the (in)appropriate acts and in the realizationpatterns of request acts in trilingual education. This failure may be due to their lackof cultural awareness, literary skills, and insufficient L2/L3 pragmatic input.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Pragmatic Awareness of the Request Speech Act in English as an Additional Language: Monolinguals or Bilinguals?
com Received: 25/12/2013 Accepted: 10/01/2014 Abstract This study attempted to investigate the effect of bilingualism on pragmatic awareness and development among Iranian Turkish/Persian EFL learners.
Data were collected through a personal profile questionnaire with questions about the participants’ language background and a WDCT with 10 situations to determine the extent to which the bilinguals demonstrated their pragmatic awareness of requests.
The results revealed a higher degree of pragmatic awareness and development, and a better realization of request speech acts in bilinguals rather than monolinguals.
Also, according to the main goal of this study, namely evaluating pragmatic awareness and the speech act realization ability of bilingual and monolingual EFL learners, Liu's (2006) standard written discourse completion test (WDCT) was used.
(2-sided) Mean (View the image of this page) In order to examine the effect of knowing two languages on using a third one, the directness level of requesting strategies used on the part of bilingual and monolingual participants was taken into account.
Discussion and Conclusion As it was indicated before, the main task of this study was to investigate the extent to which Iranian Persian and Turkish learners elicit the pragmatic awareness and exercise appropriate request formulations in English as an additional language.
Although it was expected that the bilingual learners of this study would outperform their monolingual counterparts in their English pragmatic performance, neither showed any superiority in their evaluation, justification, politeness-dependent reasons, and realization strategies about English request acts.