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DEDICATION
To the memory of my grandfather,
May his soul rest in peace!
To my parents and my two sisters whose very moral and financial support I have always
appreciated.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are many people who helped me to write this piece of study. First and foremost, I am
greatly indebted to Professor Nourddine Amrous for his guiding and assisting at all stages of
this work and for supplying necessary materials and documents. I owe a great debt of grati-
tude to the participants in this study for their outstanding cooperation and willingness to share
their thoughts with me. For help and generous support I should thank Mr. Adil Azhar and
Prof. Iqbal Zeddari.
I am also grateful to those friends who helped me to collect data for the study. In this respect,
I thank Hicham Ahamdi, Youssef Frej, and Othman Maghnaoui. I am subsequently indebted
to my seminar classmates whose discussions and interest have been a source of motivation
that keeps me going.
Last, but far from least, my very sincere thanks go to my parents, sisters, and my uncle Aziz
for their moral and financial support. In fact, there are too many people to enumerate that
some of whom were undeservedly omitted. Of course, however, I am responsible for any
shortcomings in the study; any credit I happily share it with all mentioned above.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ... 7
DEDICATION ... 9
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ... 11
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ... 15
GENERAL INTRODUCTION ... 17
I.1 Objectives and Rational ... 17
I.2 Why
Requests?
... 18
I.4 Research Questions and Hypothesis: ... 18
I.5 Organization of the Study ... 19
CHAPTER ONE
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE ... 20
II.1 Introduction
... 20
II.2 The Theoretical Background ... 20
II.2.1 Pragmatic
competence
...
20
II.2.2 Speech
Acts
...
21
II.2.3 Cross-cultural
Pragmatics:
...
23
II.2.4 Interlanguage
Pragmatics
...
24
II.3 Pragmatic Transfer
... 24
II.3.1 On
Transfer
...
24
II.3.2 Pragmalinguistic/Sociopragmatic
Transfer
...
25
II.4 Defining Requests
... 25
II.4.1 Direct and Indirect Strategies ... 26
II.4.2 The two types of indirect strategies ... 26
II.4.2.1 Conventionally
indirect
strategies
...
26
II.4.2.2 Non-conventionally Indirect Strategies (Hints) ... 27
II.4.3 Modification Categories ... 27
II.4.4 Previous Studies in the Moroccan Context ... 28
II.5 Conclusion
... 29
CHAPTER TWO
METHODOLOGY ... 30
III.1 Introduction ... 30
III.2 Research Questions and Hypothesis: ... 30
III.2.1 Research Questions: ... 30
III.2.1 Research Hypothesis: ... 31
III.3 Subjects ... 31
III.3.1 Proficiency Level and Academic Background ... 33
III.4 Research instrument ... 34
III.4.1 The discourse completion task ... 34
III.4.2 Description and Rationale ... 34
III.4.3 Situational Variables ... 35
III.4.4 The Moroccan Arabic DCT ... 36
III.5 Data Collection Procedures: ... 36
III.5.1 Data analysis
... 36
III.6 Conclusion ... 37
CHAPTER THREE
RESULTS & DISCUSSION ... 38
IV.1 Introduction ... 38
IV.2 Pragmalinguistic Analysis ... 38
IV.2.1 Major Request strategies by NSs and Mlrs ... 39
IV.2.2 Interlanguage Pragmalinguistic Transfer in the Use of the Major Strategies ... 39
IV.3 Request Sub-strategies used by NSs and MLrs ... 41
IV.3.1 Directness ... 41
IV.3.1.1 Direct
strategies
...
41
IV.3.1.2 Directness used by MLrs ... 42
IV.3.1.3 Conventionally indirect strategies (CISs) ... 43
IV.3.1.4 Perspectives:
...
45
IV.4 Sociopragmatic Analysis ... 47
IV.4.1 Directness ... 48
IV.4.2 Perspectives ... 51
IV.5 Conclusion ... 53
GENERAL CONCLUSION ... 54
V.1 Summary of the objectives ... 54
V.2 Summary of the Methodology ... 54
V.3 Summary of the Results ... 54
REFERENCES ... 57
15
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
CA: Contrastive
Analysis.
CAH:
Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis.
CCSARP:
Cross Cultural Speech Act Realization Project.
CISs: Conventionally
Indirect
Strategies.
DCT:
Discourse Completion Test.
EFL:
English as a Foreign Language.
HD: Hearer-Dominance.
IL: Interlanguage.
ILP: Interlanguage
Pragmatics.
L1: First
Language.
L2: Second
Language.
MLrs:
Moroccan Learners of English.
MLrs1:
First Year Moroccan Learners.
MLrs3:
Third Year Moroccan Learners.
NSs: Native
Speakers.
SD: Speaker-Dominance.
SLA:
Second Language Acquisition.
17
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
I.1 Objectives and Rational
The way language is acquired and learnt has for long been an intriguing issue in social
science. This question has attracted researchers from a variety of disciplines and from
different theoretical persuasion and predilections. The process of second language acquisi-
tion
1
is yet another of area that is worthy of investigation, given to the agglomerate of the
issues that this process engenders to second language learners (L2, henceforth). Of interest to
the present study is the way this process jointly interacts with a number of factors, most
important of which is the learner's mother tongue.
In this regard, a question of considerable interest is whether or not a learner's first language
affects the process of second language acquisition, insofar as this interference may either help
ease or thwart the developmental path of the learning process. Another interesting query
concerns the extent of which formal education reduces or helps circumvent this interference.
On this view, the present study sets as its research goals the objectives of providing an
investigation of 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 will seek to compare the average frequencies of direct and indirect strategies used
by both native Moroccan English as a foreign language learners and native speakers of
English. 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.
This being said, the impetus for conducting this research within the area of Interlanguage
Pragmatics stems from a variety of factors. Firstly, there are aspects in which the role of
socio-cultural rules and pragmatics cannot go unnoticed, the lack of which results in commu-
nication breakdown (see for examples Wang (2004) and Lin (2008)). Important though
grammatical competence may seem, there are cases in which socio-cultural rules transcend
grammatical rules (Hymes, 1971). Secondly, I have selected this topic to know how L2,
namely Moroccan ones, perform the speech act of request in both their L1 and L2, and what
influences the former exerts on the latter, in this case English. Equally importantly, there is an
1
Throughout this study, the term second language will be used in the sense of the languages acquired/learnt
other than one's mother tongue, be they second, third, fourth...etc.
18
ostensibly scanty number of research that have been conducted in Interlanguage Pragmatics,
namely within the Moroccan context; hence, many questions still remain uncovered and a
lack of an in-depth understanding of the factors that influence interlanguage pragmatic
development is yet to be revealed.
I.2 Why Requests?
The speech act of request has been chosen in the present study as the best tool through which
one can identify about Interlanguage Pragmatic transfer. Indeed, requests are used in every-
day communication in both Moroccan Arabic and English and, therefore, they occur in a
variety of forms (e.g. imperatives, declaratives and interrogatives) with differing situational
features under different social parameters. Furthermore, a request constitutes a face-
threatening act (Brown and Levinson 1978; 1987); hence, speakers will need to make use of
varying strategies so as to reduce the threat and to decrease the potential damage. Last but not
least, there have been studies that have been undertaken in the illocutionary act of requests.
Therefore, there is a firm ground upon which one can base further study.
I.4 Research
Questions
and
Hypothesis:
R
R
e
e
s
s
e
e
a
a
r
r
c
c
h
h
Q
Q
u
u
e
e
s
s
t
t
i
i
o
o
n
n
s
s
:
:
This study seeks to examine the use of L2 speech act of request by Moroccan learners of
English. Under this light, the purpose is to explore the strategies used by Moroccan learners
of English and to see the amount of transfer from L1 to L2 when they perform requests in
English. To this end, this study will intend to answer the following questions:
1.
To what extent do Moroccan learners of English rely on their L1 in the production of
English requests?
2.
To what extent does the level of proficiency affect Moroccan learners production of
English requests?
3.
To what extent do Moroccans learners differ with English native speakers in the pro-
duction of English requests?
19
Research Hypothesis:
In pursuance of this aim, two hypotheses have been formulated:
Hypothesis 1: There is evidence of pragmatic transfer in the English requests produced by
Moroccan learners of English.
Hypothesis 2: Pragmatic transfer decreases as the study level increases.
I.5 Organization of the Study
The present study is made up of four chapters organized as follows. The first chapter will seek
to define some key-concepts so as to situate the present study in its theoretical background.
This section also reviews the most important studies that have been undertaken in Morocco
within the frames of Interlanguage Pragmatics. The second chapter intends to give and
present a rigorous description whereby the data was collected. The third chapter falls into two
parts. The first reveals the results of the data collection and the other one will lay the ground
for the discussion of these results. The study then will be closed with a general conclusion,
drawing some research and pedagogical implications.
20
Chapter One
Review of the Literature
II.1 Introduction
The aim of this chapter is to situate the present study in its theoretical perspectives under
which the findings are meant to be discussed. The chapter is introduced with a discussion of
the pragmatic component in linguistics, particularly as part of the native speakers communi-
cative competence. Moreover, the chapter briefly traces the major pragmatics trends within
the frames of speech act theory. Next, an overview is given of the fields of cross-cultural
pragmatics and interlanguage. A definition is supplied of the field of interlanguage pragmat-
ics, to which this study belongs, along with a concise description of some relevant studies
carried out in the Moroccan context.
II.2 The Theoretical Background
II.2.1 Pragmatic
competence
The concept of communicative competence was first introduced by the anthropologist and
sociolinguist Hymes (1964) to refer to communicative competence that does not consist only
of grammatical competence; that is to say, not only should linguistic competence involve the
formal knowledge of the target language, but also the knowledge of the sociocultural rules of
appropriate language use. The fact of the matter is that Hymes concept of competence was
introduced as a reaction against Chomsky's (1965) notion of competence. For Chomsky,
competence encompasses the perfect knowledge of an ideal-speaker listener in a homogene-
ous speech community. As Chomsky (1965: 3) states:
"Linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-listener in a completely homoge-
neous speech community, who knows its language perfectly, and is unaffected by such grammati-
cally irrelevant conditions as memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and errors in
applying this knowledge of the language in actual performance."
In this regard, Hymes (1971) maintains that ,,there are rules of use without which the rules of
grammar would be useless (1971: 278). As a matter of fact, Hymes concept of communica-
tive competence brought a radical shift to the study of language, which began to account for
studying language in its actual use that is appropriate and acceptable to a particular speech
community. More recently, other linguists have extended the idea of communicative compe-
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