Pragmatic competence in Spanish students of EFL: making requests and apologies

Abstract

[Abstract] This dissertation examines the pragmatic competence of Spanish advanced learners of English through the performance of requests and apologies. Data has been drawn from production questionnaires by means of the elicitation of the speech acts expected. As we were interested in the communicative effect of the utterances, a group of British informants was required to evaluate their acceptability and/or offensiveness in order to ensure natural native speaker reactions to the utterances produced, and therefore provide academically valid data. Due to the input provided by these external evaluators, we have been able to reach some interesting conclusions about pragmatic failure, that is to say, unsuccessful communication caused by deficiencies in the students’ pragmatic competence, which are not only related to cultural differences but also to personal traits. Hence, at the end of this dissertation we offer strategies and techniques than can help to compensate this insufficiency by raising the pragmatic awareness of both foreign language learners and teachers in the classroom.