Offers in Saudi EFL talks: A focus on the learners’ pragmatic competence in interactions

Abstract

The current study was driven by the most recent research trend of interlanguage pragmatics, which regards communication as a complex phenomenon and considers a learner's ability to produce social actions in extended discourse. It investigated the interactional structure of offers in natural conversations by nine Saudi learners of English (SEFL) when interacting with a British English native speaker. Conversations were recorded during a dinner attended by three to four friends. Comparable sets of data were collected from native speakers of Saudi Arabic (SA) and British English (BE). Both quantitative and qualitative analysis revealed that the three cultural groups in this study did not get involved in intricate negotiations of offers during the conversation among friends; however, this was not necessarily to the same degree. The SEFL learners' interactional tools were not native-like. They showed more limited interactional resources and a pattern of direct offers by using elliptic forms or conveying the offer nonverbally. A possible pragmatic transfer was observed in their preference for employing nonverbal offers and invoking God. However, they were like the BE speakers in their insistence, which was often made with strategies that consider imposition on the addressee and usually closed in two adjacency pairs.