How polite can you get?: A comparative analysis of interlanguage pragmatic knowledge in Spanish and Moroccan EFL university students

Abstract

This study is anchored in the field of interlanguage pragmatics (ITP), and the approach taken is speech-act based. In particular, our investigation compares Spanish and Moroccan university learners in the way they perceive analogies, requests and refusals with a view to shedding light on their pragmatic knowledge and strategy differences. Data were collected by a Multiple-choice discourse completion tasks questionnaire. Results show that Spanish and Moroccan speakers performed equally in terms of the apology speech act, but differed significantly when performing request and refusal speech acts. They also reveal that the two groups of participants were significantly different in terms of their indirect distractor choice, but not in their strategy and direct choices. These findings are supported by previous research.