Abstract
Criticism is inherently impolite and a face-threatening act generally leading to conflicts among interlocutors. It is equally challenging for both native and non-native speakers, and needs pre-planning before performing it. The current research examines the production of non-institutional criticism by Iraqi EFL university learners and American native speakers. More specifically, it explores to what extent Iraqi EFL learners and American native speakers vary in (i) performing criticism, (ii) mitigating criticism, and (iii) their pragmatic choices according to the contextual variables of power and distance. To collect data, a discourse-completion task was used to elicit written data from 20 Iraqi EFL learners and 20 American native speakers. Findings revealed that though both groups regularly used all strategy types, Iraqi EFL learners criticized differently from American speakers. When expressing criticism, Iraqi learners tended to be indirect whereas American speakers tended to be direct. In mitigating their criticism, Iraqi learners were significantly different from American speakers in their use of internal and external modifiers. Furthermore, both groups substantially varied their pragmatic choices according to context. The differences in their pragmatic performance could be attributed to a number of interplaying factors such as EFL learners’ limited linguistic and pragmatic knowledge, the context of learning and L1 pragmatic transfer. Finally, a number of conclusions and pedagogical implications are presented.
Highlights
In the last few decades, the field of language teaching has witnessed the emergence of the communicative teaching approach
The overall distribution of the two main categories of criticism reveals that Iraqi EFL learners and American native speakers employ different preferences for strategy types
American speakers tend to be direct in their criticisms whereas Iraqi EFL learners tend to be indirect in their criticisms
Summary
In the last few decades, the field of language teaching has witnessed the emergence of the communicative teaching approach. The communicative approach views that to develop the learners‟ communicative competence, the context of foreign language teaching and learning is not merely teaching and learning the grammatical structures and formal features of a language, rather it should be about how to use language appropriately in real-life interactional situations. Raising learners‟ awareness of the cultural values and practices of the target language is crucial for efficient communication in the process of foreign and second language teaching and learning. Pragmatic competence is defined as “the knowledge of the linguistic resources available in a given language for realizing particular speech acts, knowledge of the sequential aspects of speech acts, and knowledge of the appropriate contextual use of the particular language's linguistic resources” Pragmatic competence is defined as “the knowledge of the linguistic resources available in a given language for realizing particular speech acts, knowledge of the sequential aspects of speech acts, and knowledge of the appropriate contextual use of the particular language's linguistic resources” (Barron, 2003, p. 10)
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