Pragmatic Competence of Iraqi EFL Learners

The book attempts to conduct a study into the realization of the speech acts of suggestion and advice by Iraqi EFL university learners from a pragmatic perspective. Thus, 60 Iraqi learners of English participated in this work with its Multiple Choice Questionnaire (henceforth, MCQ) and Discourse Completion Test (henceforth, DCT) for this purpose. The behaviour of the learners in the DCT is compared with the behaviour of a group consisting of four native English speakers so as to find out the similarities and differences between the two groups. According to the results of the test, certain pedagogical recommendations are offered to improve the performance of the learners in issuing an appropriate suggestion and advice. The data analysed indicated discrepancies in the three aspects investigated, suggestion, advice and modification devices in the performance of the subjects. This work aims at (1) distinguishing between suggestion and advice from each other and from other speech acts, (2) investigating the ability of Iraqi EFL university learners in differentiating between suggestion and advice on the one hand, and between them and other speech acts on the other hand.