A Corpus Based Study of the Relationship among the Iranian EFL Students’ Gender, Language Proficiency, and Cross-cultural Knowledge of Apologizing and Requesting

Abstract

One of the issues in communicative language teaching (CLT) domain is pragmatic knowledge. One of the issues that has gained significance in pragmatic studies is the relationship among pragmatic knowledge, gender, and language proficiency. A few studies have investigated the effect of gender on pragmatics knowledge and the relationship between language proficiency and pragmatic knowledge; on the other hand, few of these studies have been corpus based. In this study, the relationship among the Iranian EFL students' gender, language proficiency, and comprehension of speech acts (apologizing and requesting) were examined. Then the findings were compared with the international corpus collections of the speech acts. To that end, 30 male and 30 female EFL students from Islamic Azad university of Hamadan were selected through quota sampling. Two kinds of tests, IELTS test and Discourse Completion Task (DCT) test, were administered to measure the students' language proficiency and speech acts knowledge. The results of data analysis showed that in pragmatics test, the female students outperformed the male students and in language proficiency test male students outperformed female ones. Therefore, the results of this study implied that gender affects the students' pragmatic knowledge and there is no relationship between pragmatic knowledge and language proficiency knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]