The Speech Act of Complaint: A Contrastive Study of Iraqi and Chinese EFL learners of English

Abstract

This research investigates the pragmatic ability of Iraqi and Chinese English language students to make complaints in English in different contexts. To evaluate the effects of different cultural dimensions on speech acts of complaint, discourse completion tests, which are used in linguistics and pragmatics to test language proficiency and measure the pragmatic ability of students, were administered to undergraduate students of English from College of Arts/University of Anbar, Iraq and College of Arts/Beijing Language and Culture University, China. The responses of students were then compared to responses obtained from native English speakers of British nationality on the same test. Results have shown that Iraqi EFL learners of English are rather far behind the linguistic and pragmatic competence in performing speech acts of complain while their Chinese counterparts are more indirect than both the Iraq EFL and native British speaker in performing speech act of complain. The results of this study are useful in amending pedagogic process of teaching English language use in countries, such as Iraq and China, where English is not widely used.