Interlanguage Pragmatics: A Study of Moroccan EFL Learners' Requests (PDF)

The ultimate goal of this study is to investigate the issue of pragmatic transfer from L1 into the interlanguage of Moroccan learners of English, namely when these learners make requests in English. More specifically, this study seeks to compare the average frequencies of direct and indirect strategies used by both native Moroccan English as a foreign language learners and native English speakers. Finally, this study will further attempt to explore whether transfer decreases as the study level increases, namely the case of the Moroccan EFL university learners at the first and the third level of University.
A number of sixty subjects take part in the present study. They are divided into two groups. The first group involves the Moroccan learners of English who in turn bifurcated into two groups of academic level: Second Year (N=20) and Third year (N=20). The subjects in the second group are 20 native speakers of English. In order to answer the research questions addressed in this study, the Discourse Completion Task (DCT) is adopted. This DCT provides the subjects with a number of seven situations in which different situations are controlled, namely social distance, power relation, and the degree of imposition. A Moroccan Arabic DCT is also used in order to examine how Moroccan students perform requests in their mother tongues.
The results reveal that evidence of pragmatic transfer is found in the requests produced by Moroccan learners of English. Thus, the first hypothesis is confirmed. The second finding is that academic level does not play a major role in pragmatic ability. For this fact, the second research hypothesis is rejected in favor of the null hypothesis drawing the conclusion that pragmatic transfer is not related to academic level. To sum up the whole, a number of research and pedagogical implications are suggested.