Arab Educational Information Network

A basic problem for a theory of communicative competence and speech acts (SAs) is to find a connection between linguistic and contextual features that help the hearer (H) to recognize the illocutions that speakers (Ss) intend to convey by their utterances. This seems to be even more necessary since illocutions can be realized with a various number of linguistic structures and sentence types. Accordingly, and to empirically prove this connection, a qualitative study had been conducted on 30 Iraqi foreign language (FL) learners of differing proficiency levels; viz. (12) high proficiency and (18) low proficiency groups. As a means of collecting data, a multiple-choice test of 16 situation items have been adopted investigating a subset of 8 SAs, namely: invitation, request, refusal, complaint, apology, comforting, warning and reprimand. Each one of these SAs was represented in two items in the test. In an attempt to find answers to the questions being raised by the present study, the data collected had thus been analyzed relying on Excel 0.7 program to elicit the frequency count percentages of the responses that guessed the right SA prevailing in the items. Besides, overall score averages and overall frequency count percentages between the two groups of language proficiency had also been conducted and compared. The results obtained showed that the participants especially those of the high level made much reliance on both features succeeding to attain the right locutions, thus outperforming their corresponding low level; and this is certainly attributed to the formers’ L2 linguistic mastery. (Published abstract)