The pragmatic competence in Macedonian learners of German – an intercultural study on the example of speech act request

Ivanovska, Biljana and Kusevska, Marija (2021) The pragmatic competence in Macedonian learners of German – an intercultural study on the example of speech act request. Journal of Language for Specific Purposes. pp. 35-51. ISSN 2359 – 8921

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Abstract

Abstract: The study presented in this article is a part of the project "The role of explicit Instruction in developing pragmatic competence in English and German as foreign languages", carried out at the “Goce Delčev” University in Štip, R. North Macedonia. It is an interlanguage study of how the Macedonian students of German formulate the speech act request with respect to strategy use, speech act modification and speech act perspective. Additionally, it compares non-native speaker to native speaker requests and investigates what makes non-native speaker requests sound inappropriate. Special focus is also placed on how Macedonian learners of German use the politeness marker ‘bitte’ in comparison to German native speakers. The importance of this study for the Macedonian linguistic environment is twofold. First, it contributes to the enlargement of the pool of cross-cultural and interlanguage studies in pragmatics in the Republic of North Macedonia. Second, it provides for evidence-based approach to German language learning in general, and in Macedonia in particular. The classification of the request strategies is based on Blum-Kulka (1982) and House & Kasper (1989). The results show that although there is some correlation in the way requests are formulated by the two groups, the requests of the Macedonian learners of German show some deviations. This analysis shows that intermediate learners of German in the Republic of North Macedonia prefer conventional indirect strategies for formulating requests. However, most of them use a limited number of expressions. They use different types of modifications in order to sound polite, but very often there is not a big difference between the expressions they use in formal and informal situations. This indicates that they need more exposure to various situations and more practice of request strategies with respect to different interlocutors. The native speakers’ requests are more formal and thus sound more polite. Macedonian learners give more elaborate background information, their explanations and justifications are longer, and the politeness marker ‘bitte’ is not always appropriately used. They found it as an important feature which adds courteousness to the utterance and they use it too often because they do not want to sound impolite and think that its omission can lead to a completely impolite sentence.
They also use expressions oriented to the listener more often, while the expressions from a common perspective are very rare. There is a lack of valid standards, materials and hardly any curricula that place a focus on developing communicative and pragmatic skills in foreign language learners in the Republic of North Macedonia, and there is a significant need for effective ways of improving learners' communication and pragmatic skills. The aim of our paper is to fulfill this gap.

Key words: interlanguage; pragmatic competence; requests; strategies; modification.

Item Type:	Article
Subjects:	Humanities > Languages and literature
Divisions:	Faculty of Philology
Depositing User:	Biljana Ivanovska
Date Deposited:	10 Mar 2021 07:40
Last Modified:	10 Mar 2021 07:40
URI:	https://eprints.ugd.edu.mk/id/eprint/27487

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