The Speech Acts Recognition of ESP Students with and without Body Language

Abstract

This paper mainly deals with recognition of speech acts of body language by suggesting various types of body language in order to achieve the study objectives which aim at identifying the difference between speech act recognition of the ESP students with and without body language, once by listening to the speaker then by listening and watching the speaker body language of the speaker. This study is limited to 1st year students at Computer Science department College of Science for Women at University of Baghdad. Two listening tests are designed which consist of various types of speech acts in the audio that suit ESP university students’ level of English language. In the first test, the students listened to the audio voice of the speaker talked about English proverbs and the students are asked to tick the speech acts items each time they appear, while in the second test, the same students listen and watch videos of body language of the same speaker talking about the same subject and they are also asked to tick the items of speech acts that they are ticked in the first test each time they appear. Results show that there is a significant difference between the speech acts tests by listening to the audio recording of the presenter on one hand, and watching the video recording on the other hand, and in favour of watching the video that used body language. The results validated listening and watching the video since the computed value of the t- test (1.98) is higher than the tabulated t- value (1.69) at (29) degree of freedom and (0.05) level of significance.