Analysing EFL Learners’ Pragmatic Failure in Requesting their Teachers.

Abstract

This research is a “pragmatic study” which focuses on the analysis of speech act of requesting used by EFL learners. The present study is drawn upon two main purposes. First, it investigates the types of pragmatic failure and the common strategies of requesting. Second, to explore the main barriers that EFL learners encounter while requesting their teachers and find possible solutions that can help in reducing such pragmatic failure (and overcome the obstacles that student confront) in order to gain sufficient implicit knowledge and a successful communication. This research is descriptive qualitative research which attempts to analyse and interpret the data, it is also supported by quantitative analysis, by which the researchers use statistical analysis to examine and count the different request strategies and the types of pragmatic failure applied by EFL learners. In this respect, the study takes 40 EFL learners as a sample, particularly, students from different high schools from Tiaret. The investigation is carried out based on data obtained from discourse completion test and structured interview. The findings reveal that there are some barriers that contribute to the pragmatic failure between the EFL learners and their teachers in doing the act of requesting, some of the barriers identified are: stress, fear, and shyness, lack of grammar rules, poor sentences structures and spelling mistakes. In conclusion, the research inferred that the second language learners fail in non verbal communication meanwhile they succeed verbally.