Abstract
The English language competence of an EFL learner can be reflectedin his pragmatic competence. Yet, for language learners and teachers a mastery of the pragmatic competence may unconsciously be neglected. In other words, it may not be taught in line with the grammatical competence since the initial period of learning. The article centers on two problems: (1) the similarities and differences of speech act of complaints among Indonesian EFL learners, Indonesian EFL teachers and American native speakers, and (2) the evidence of any pragmatic transfer in the complaint performance. DCT was used to gather the data, which was then analyzed using Rinnert, Nogami and Iwai?s aspects of complaining (2006). It was found that there were both differences and similarities of complaints performed by both the native and non-native speakers of English when power and social status were involved. Some evidence on pragmatic transfer was also tangible; mainly it was due to cultural differences
Highlights
Being competent second or foreign language speakersis demonstrated through the linguistic and communicative competence (Hymes, 2001, p. 55)
The findings indicated a pragmatic transfer of the Americans who learned Japanese as a foreign language
The study employed the Discourse Completion Tasks or Discourse Completion Tests (DCTs) (Tanck, 2002;Rinnert, Nogami, & Iwai, 2006; Umar, 2006; O'Keeffe, A., Clancy, B., and Adolphs, S., 2011)which were distributed to Indonesian EFL teachers, Indonesian EFL students and American native-speaker teachers, who were selected based on convenient sampling
Summary
Being competent second or foreign language speakersis demonstrated through the linguistic and communicative competence (Hymes, 2001, p. 55). While the former covers one‟s performance with regard to grammatical forms including the phonological, morphological, syntactic and lexical forms, the latter displays what functionsthat one can produce with his grammatical knowledge, e.g. requesting, thanking, inviting, and complaining To be able to produce appropriate utterances in a target language learners need to be exposed to various situations containing different pragmatic aspects, e.g. deixis, implicatures, and speech acts,that may require different communication strategies Numerous research hasshown that it is not easy for learners to create appropriate utterances that involve the pragmatic strategies frequently used by the English native speakers. The pragmatic awareness, though, is an integrated part of a language that has to be reflected in one‟s language performance (Rhurakvit, 2011; Tanck, 2002; Umar, 2006)
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