The Role of Speech Acts in Raising Pragmatic Competence Awareness among Students in EFL Classroom

Abstract

Among different definitions about Pragmatics as a science, the following two were chosen on purpose. Pragmatics is the study of speaker meaning, (Yule, 1996). Pragmalinguistics refers to the resources for conveying communicative acts and relational or interpersonal meanings, (Leech, 1983). This paper focuses on speech acts as crucial aspect of pragmatics. The main idea of the paper is to highlight the correlation between teaching speech acts and developing pragmatic competence of EFL students through classroom activities. As House (1996) stated, bringing together the ability to carry out speech acts and manage ongoing conversation, benefited instructional effects on pragmatic fluency - the extent to which students' conversational contributions are relevant, polite, and overall effective. Given the explanation of all types of speech acts, students gain additional skills on expressing promises, requests, apologies, emotional and psychological states etc. These skills might be evident on their correct usage and understanding of language in contexts, clearly stated on the usage of mitigating devices, opening and closing remarks, discourse markers, apologetic formulae, intensifiers etc.