Abstract

Pragmatics relates specifically to the knowledge of the cultural and social background of the language and context of communication. It poses a great challenge for Arabic as an Additional Language (AAL) students. Thus, due to the lack of pragmatic competence, AAL students often have great difficulty using context-appropriate speech acts such as requests, refusals, and apologies (Al-Gahtani, 2017). This paper focuses on request acts because they are the most frequently used and most challenging in AAL; if used inappropriately, they can pose discomfort to the face of the addressee. Currently, there exists a research gap wherein no scholarly investigations have yet examined AAL speech acts used by female students in written naturalistic interactions on social media.  As a result, this study is based on WhatsApp messages sent by female university students to their lecturers at a large university in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. 10,882 WhatsApp messages have been analysed quantitatively to investigate the existence of correlation between the use of direct and indirect requests and the AAL students’ language proficiency and length of residence in the target language community. The findings indicate that the higher the linguistic level of AAL students, the less they use direct requests. The request strategies of non-Arabs (NA) who stay in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) for a long period are similar to the Saudi Arabian students’ (SA) request strategies. Finally, this study suggests recommendations to facilitate effective communication between female AAL students and their lecturers, and reduce misunderstandings resulting from a lack of pragmatic competence.

Al-Gahtani, S. M. (2017). نحو تدريس الكفاية التداولية في برامج تعليم اللغة الثانية: دراسة تحليلية / Towards the teaching of pragmatic competence in L2 programs. مجلة الدراسات اللغوية والأدبية (Journal of Linguistic and Literary Studies), 8(2), 21-55. https://doi.org/10.31436/jlls.v8i2.534