IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS’ REALIZATION OF CONGRATULATION SPEECH ACT: AN INTERLANGUAGE PRAGMATICS STUDY

The speech act of congratulation has not been extensively researched, and the few studies that have dealt with congratulation are either descriptive or cross-cultural. Therefore, this study was an attempt to investigate the interlanguage pragmatic behavior of Iranian EFL learners, focusing on the realization of the congratulatory speech act in English. The study was also interested in investigating whether Iranian EFL learners' realization of the speech act of congratulation is related to their L۲ level. To this end, this study adopted a quantitative research design and utilized two data collection instruments including Oxford Quick Placement Test (۲۰۰۴) and Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) in both English and Persian. Following the traditional interlingual design, three groups of participants took part in this study, including Iranian EFL undergraduates who responded in both English and Persian, and American English Native Speakers (NSs) who responded in English. For the first part of the study, participants were divided into three proficiency levels (basic, intermediate, and advanced) based on their scores on the Oxford Quick Placement Test. The WDCT was administered to the Iranian EFL learners in both English and Persian, and the American NSs received and responded to the questionnaire via email. The elicited congratulatory responses were analyzed according to Elwood's (۲۰۰۴b) coding scheme. The results of this study show that Iranian EFL learners have access to the same congratulatory strategies as English NSs, but they sometimes have different strategy preferences. Moreover, L۲ level has been found to be associated with Iranian EFL learners' realization of the speech act "congratulation".

کلیدواژه ها:

interlanguage pragmatics ، realization of speech acts ، expressive speech acts ، congratulation speech act