The Speech Act of Promise Among Arabic Native and Non-Native Speakers: A Pragmatic-Comparative Study.

Résumé

Speech Act Theory has received a great deal of attention in pragmatics studies, especially in the field of teaching and acquiring foreign languages. The majority of previous studies have focused mostly on learning English as a Second language, while learning Arabic as a second language has not received the same attention in related Speech Act theory studies. Therefore, the present study seeks to fill this gap in the relevant Arabic literature by examining one speech act studied by L2 learners of Arabic, that is 'the act of promise', through looking into the types of promise acts that are more likely to be used by Arabic L2 learners, and how the performance of these learners differs from the that of native Arabic speakers.

Forty respondents participated in this study through administering a questionnaire. The respondents have been divided into two groups: twenty students are Arabic L2 learners, and the other twenty are native Arabic speakers. The Discourse Completion Task (DCT) tool, i.e., the questionnaire, which comprises ten situations, has been used to collect the data for this study, and has been analyzed using both the quantitative and qualitative approaches. The findings of the study quantitatively show that on one hand, there are differences between Arabic L2 learners, and native Arabic speakers in terms of the usage and frequency of use of promise act types. On the other hand, analysis qualitatively indicates that when examining the participants’ utterances, L2 learners’ performance in terms of using the promise act differs from that of native Arabic speakers. In addition, the study shows that the language level of L2 learners had no positive effect on their performance related to the promise act, which further explains the difference in their pragmatic performance compared to that of native speakers.