Thesis (PhD) - Cyprus International University. Institute of Graduate Studies and Research. English Language Teaching Department

Includes bibliography (sheets 143-160)

ABSTRACT
One of the most fundamental aspects of human life is verbal communication. Pragmatics is a field of study that deals with issues mainly on verbal communication. It is concerned with people’s intended meanings, assumptions, purposes, aims, and actions. In this respect, the current study endowered to investigate and determine the extent to which Iraqi Kurdish university EFL learners’ level of English, as a foreign language, can perceive and generate implicatures. Several studies investigated Pragmatic aspects in general and in the current setting. However, the majority of studies focused on the pragmatic competence of English language learners. Only a few research examined learners’ pragmatic ability through observation of their performance in the target language. Unlike other aspects, especially among Kurdish EFL learners in Northern Iraq, implicature comprehension and production have neither been investigated nor has been a subject of cross-cultural or cross-linguistic research. The study utilized a descriptive and quantitative research design in which data were collected using two instruments: A 19-item Multiple Discourse Completion Test (MDCT) to collect comprehension data and a 12-item Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) to collect the production data. The study participants comprised 109 (67 female & 42 male) Kurdish EFL university students (KEFLUS) and 20 (13 female & 7 male) native speakers of English (NSE). The collected data were analyzed using SPSS, the Gricean framework (1975), and a rating rubric developed by Jernigan (2007).
The results unveiled Kurdish EFL learners have a low level of implicature comprehension as well as production. As opposed to particularized implicatures, participants were more successful in the interpretation of generalized ones. Results displayed learners had difficulty understanding conversational implicatures that are context-dependent and sensitive to culture. It is also revealed that the transfer of knowledge and mother tongue seem to govern the way in which they comprehend and produce implicatures. Moreover, the findings showed female learners outperformed their male counterparts in the tests. Likewise, private university learners performed better than public university students. Finally, a discrepancy between KEFLUS and NSE was observed.