TY - BOOK AU - Kaderli,Aycan AU - Razı,Özge TI - PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE IN EFL: LEARNERS' MOTIVATION AND PRODUCTION PY - 2024/// KW - English Language KW - Dissertations, Academic KW - Study and teaching N1 - Thesis (PhD) - Cyprus International University. Institute of Graduate Studies and Research English Language Teaching N2 - Numerous language-learning variables play a crucial role in students' pragmatic competence development. However, amongst many of these variables, factors like age, gender, and proficiency level have not been extensively researched. Specifically, domains like motivation and its role in pragmatic development are understudied. This extensive study followed a mixed methods approach with a sequential mixed design first to investigate English preparatory school students' general pragmatic and speech-act-specific motivation and explore their relationship with speech act production. Research acknowledges that mixed method research design assist is an approach that assists in obtaining both qualitative and quantitative data on a phenomenon investigated (Creswell, 2007). A quantitative approach was adopted for the first part of this study to determine an in-depth understanding of students' pragmatic motivation and speech act-specific motivation for request, refusal, and apology. Secondly, preparatory school students' performance in pragmatic production has been investigated. Their ability to achieve pragmatic production has been measured with a Written Discourse Completion Test, a measure of pragmatic production. One hundred and sixty students participated in this study. The participants were predominantly students who studied at the preparatory school of a private university in North Cyprus. After collecting the data, it was analysed. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) 26 and AMOS 26 software were used to analyse the research data. The teacher-made rubric for analysing pragmatic production was used to analyse the test for learners' pragmatic production based on the WDCT. This rubric was structured on four variables: formality, politeness, directness, and appropriateness. The study revealed no significant difference between male and female EFL learners' motivation for pragmatic and speech acts. Also, the study unveiled that no significant differences exist among age groups of EFL learners in their motivation for pragmatic and speech acts. Furthermore, no significant differences exist among proficiency levels of EFL learners in their pragmatic and speech act motivation. From the analysis of the results, it has been reported that a statistically significant relationship exists between the participants' general pragmatic motivation and speech act-specific iii motivation. Equally, results concerning how learners produce requests, refusals and apologies in different social contexts were provided and reported in the study. The analysis of the production tests indicated that most of the learners were able to produce the required level of politeness, formality and appropriateness in their speech acts ER -