An investigation into the use of suggestion by Iranian EFL learners

There has been a considerably vast amount of research on different speech acts in the second language field in Iran; however, suggestion speech act has been less concentrated on. Whit this in mind, this study was an attempt to investigate the linguistic forms used to perform the speech act of suggestions by Iranian EFL learners. To this end, ۴۵ Iranian female EFL learners at the intermediate level of Top Notch, ۳B, were chosen as the population of the study. Then, to homogenize the participants, an Oxford Placement Test was administered. Based on the scores, ۱۰ participants were excluded from the study. Then the respondents were asked to complete a Discourse Completion Task (DCT) consisting of six scenarios they were supposed to imagine themselves in and make suggestions to their supposed counterparts. In this way, their suggestion acts were explored. To this end, their responses were analyzed qualitatively based on the taxonomy of suggestion adapted from the study conducted by Jiang (۲۰۰۶). Then, descriptive statistics, frequency and percentage, was applied. The results revealed that the subjects used suggestion structures with different frequencies in their interactions. In this regards, modals, performatives and imperatives were commonly used for suggestions in the learners’ interactions.

Keywords:

Pragmatic Competence , Speech Acts , EFL learners , Making Suggestions , DCT