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The Relationship Between Grammatical Knowledge and Pragmatic

Knowledge of Speech Act of Request in Iranian EFL Learners
Bahareh Ashoorpour1, Houshang Azari2
Department of English Language, Islamic Azad University,
Tonekabon Branch, IRAN.
1
[email protected]

ABSTRACT
The purpose of the current study was, to investigate the relationship between
grammatical knowledge and pragmatic knowledge of speech act of request among
Iranian EFL learners. This study is an attempt to examine whether there is a
significant relationship between grammatical knowledge and pragmatic knowledge of
speech acts. The total data were obtained from a 90 university students majoring in
English Translation in Rasht Azad University. In order to achieve this goal, the
researcher first administered an OPT test; this test was supposed to determine the
degree of language proficiency of each individual. After that the researcher divided
the learners into 3 groups of pre-intermediate, intermediate and advanced group.
Then for measuring grammatical knowledge of these selected subjects a validated 30
items grammar test administered. Then a discourse completion test (DCT)
questionnaire as a pragmatic test had been taken. in the present study the speech act
of request investigated .The calculated data were analyzed through an inferential
statistics. The findings of the study obtained through statistical analyses indicated
that there is significant relationship between grammatical knowledge and pragmatic
competence in pre-intermediate and intermediate level students. But those who were
in advanced level and have more grammatical knowledge performed better both in
grammatical knowledge and pragmatic competence.
Keywords: pragmatics, speech acts, request, grammatical knowledge, EFL learner

INTRODUCTION
Communicating with speakers of other languages and cultures needs the linguistic
competence (grammatical competence) as well as pragmatic competence or knowledge,
which is considered as one of the main intricacies of language competence. Socio-cultural
norms and constraints influence individuals’ speaking in their first or second language as well
as the way of interaction with others.
Pragmatics is considered as a subfield of linguistics developed in the late 1970s and has been
defined in various ways, reflecting authors’ theoretical orientation and audience. Many
definitions have been proposed for pragmatics. Crystal (1997 p.301), as one of the prominent
and a pioneer of pragmatics domain, has defined pragmatics as:
The study of language from users’ viewpoints: These standpoints include making the choices
on the part of the users, confronting with the constraints in their social interaction and their
effect of their language use on other speakers in the process of interaction. In other words,
pragmatics is the study of communicative action in its socio cultural context. This
communicative or interactional action consists of an assortment of perspectives
encompassing performing and making use of the speech acts ( like requesting, apologizing,
complaining, complimenting, thanking and so on) Yule (1996) defined pragmatics as “the
study of intended speaker meaning” (p.127). Pragmatics includes “the study of how speakers
use and understand speech acts” (Richards and Schmidt 2002).
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It is worth considering the fact that pragmatics plays a very important role in the production
and perception of the language. That is why interlocutors should have enough pragmatic
knowledge to produce and perceive the proper and intended speech acts based on the
situation. Therefore, possessing pragmatic competence is one of the key factors in the process
of communication. Pragmatic competence in foreign language contexts is defined as the
knowledge of communicative action or speech acts, how to perform it, and the ability to
utilize the language in proper ways based on the context or contextual factors (Kasper 1997;
Kasper & Roever 2005). In addition, Leech (1983) and Thomas (1983) divided the pragmatic
competence into pragmalinguistic competence, ‘‘the particular resources which a given
language provides for conveying particular illocutions’’, i.e., the degree to which one is able
to use appropriate linguistic forms to realize speech acts and their associated strategies and
sociopragmatic competence, ‘‘the sociological interface of pragmatics’’, which refers to
understanding of contextual variables such as the social distance, power and imposition of the
action between participants in an interaction. In other words, the relationship between
linguistic action and social structure refers to social factors such as status, social distance and
degree of imposition that influence what kinds of linguistic acts are performed and how they
are performed (Martinez-Flor and Uśo-Juan 2010).
In fact, two conclusions can thus be made about pragmatic competence (Rose, 1997b; Taylor,
1988). First, pragmatic competence consists of knowledge, and not the ability to use
knowledge. Second, pragmatic competence consists of (at least) two components: knowledge
of a pragmatic system, and knowledge of its appropriate use. The former provides the range
of linguistic options available to individuals for performing various acts (pragmalinguistics) ,
while the later enables them to select the appropriate choice given a particular goal in a
particular setting (Sociopragmatics).
To use English successfully in international communication, people who have different
linguistic and cultural backgrounds truly need communicative competence: the ability to use
grammatically-correct sentences in appropriate contexts (Bachman, 1990; Canale and Swain,
1980; Hymes, 1971). Communicative competence subsumes linguistic competence and
pragmatic competence. While the former refers to the ability to recognize language rules in
order to form grammatically-correct sentences, the latter is the ability to use language
appropriately in various contexts.
As one of the main goals of learning a second language is communicating the speakers of that
language, being prepared to face with a large number of L2 interactions is vital.
Lack of pragmatic knowledge is most evident among EFL learners while communicating
with people from other cultures. EFL teachers mostly concentrate on the grammar and
vocabulary (linguistic competence) and they do not pay sufficient attention to the pragmatic
or sociolinguistic dimension of language. Therefore, EFL learners may produce utterances
that are perfectly grammatical, but they may violate social norms of the target language
because they lack pragmatic competence (appropriateness of meaning) to support
grammatical competence (appropriateness of form) (Thomas 1983; Leech 1983; Bardovi-
Harlig & Dornyei 1998).
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The specific research questions addressed in this study were:
RQ1: Do grammatical knowledge and pragmatic competence of speech acts relate each
other in pre-intermediate level learners?

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RQ2: Do grammatical knowledge and pragmatic knowledge of speech acts relate to each
other in intermediate level learners?
RQ3: Do grammatical knowledge and pragmatic competence of speech acts relate to
each other in advanced level learners?

METHOD
The Design of the Study
The design to carry out this study was quantitative. The quantitative research refers to the
systematic empirical investigation of social phenomena via statistical, mathematical or
computational techniques. And the design was also quasi-experimental, because not all the
factors were strictly controlled as those of true experimental method. In fact according to
Farhady (1997) "in applied linguistics the researcher deal with the most complicated human
behavior".
Participants
The participants for the main study drew from a population of 90 Iranian EFL learners of
English at university. They were selected through their mean scores of OPT test; from that
population 30 subjects, representing three homogeneous groups were selected through their
mean scores. After that the researcher divided the learners into 3 groups of pre-intermediate,
intermediate and advanced group according to their language proficiency obtained from OPT
test. They were 30 students in each group.
Instruments and Materials
In this study three instruments were utilized for data collection purposes. The first instrument
was a language proficiency test, oxford placement test (OPT), the second one was a Grammar
test of TOEFL, and at last, a Pragmatic Competence test of Discourse Completion Task
(DCT) was the main instruments used to collect data for this study.
Data Collection and Analysis
The data were collected over two weeks during the second semester of 2013-2014 academic
years. The data collection was carried out by the researcher with the cooperation of 90 EFL
students of Rasht Islamic Azad University. In each part and for each group, the nature of the
research was explained for the students. The exams were administered in three sessions. In
the first session, an OPT test administered to examine the level of language proficiency of the
subjects in order to be located into three different level groups. At the beginning of the exam
session, the students were informed that this proficiency test is supposed to tap their overall
English knowledge and it does not have any negative points. After scoring the Oxford
Placement Test, the mean and the standard deviation were calculated. In order to divide the
participants into three groups of high, mid, and low, it was decided to consider the scores
which lie one standard deviation above the mean as the high group and the ones lining one
standard deviation below the mean as low and the scores lining in between as the mid.
In the second session, a standard grammar test given to students that included 30 questions.
Participants' responses to items of grammatical test were given a single point for ten out of
the thirty items and half a point given to each of twenty other items. Then in the next step
they had been given a Discourse Completion Test in order to obtain data about their use of
request speech act, they were scored according to their type of language used, that is being
pragmatically accurate and appropriate.

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In order to find answers to the research questions posed earlier, a number of statistical
analyses were run on the data, Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS) to calculate
the Means, Standard Deviation for each of these three groups. Finally the results indicated the
relationship between grammatical knowledge and pragmatic competence of different groups,
calculated by using a Pearson Correlation Coefficient.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

To be able to answer the research questions introduced earlier. , the researcher considered the
appropriate data analysis into consideration.
The First Question of the Study
Do grammatical knowledge and pragmatic knowledge of speech act of request relate each
other in pre-intermediate level learners?
To answer this question, the scores of all Pre-intermediate level students (low group)
regarding their performance in grammar knowledge and pragmatic knowledge for the speech
act of request were compared. The results are shown in the following table.
Table 1. The descriptive statistics for the grammar and pragmatic competence at pre-
intermediate level

Mean Std. Deviation N

Grammar 12.05 2.537 30

Pragmatic 6.15 2.653 30

Table 1 gives the descriptive statistics of the participants 'performance in grammar

knowledge and pragmatic competence for the speech act of request. The table shows the
mean differences and standard deviation of pre-intermediate level students. As shown there is
a significant difference between these groups.
Table 2. Correlation coefficient between grammar knowledge and pragmatic competence At
pre-intermediate level

Grammar Pragmatic

Pearson Correlation 1 .028

Grammar Sig. (2-tailed) .882

N 30 30

Pearson Correlation .028 1

Pragmatic Sig. (2-tailed) .882

N 30 30

The second table is the correlation coefficient estimate of these two variables at the pre-
intermediate level. As the output presents, the significance is (.882) that is more than (0.05)
(p value > 0.05).

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Therefore there is no correlation between grammatical knowledge and pragmatic

competence for the speech act of request among subjects at the low group level, Thus it
shows increasing in grammatical knowledge does not significantly cause to increasing in
pragmatic knowledge of speech act of request at pre-intermediate level students. So the first
hypothesis is accepted.

Figure 1. Pre-intermediate level scatter graph in grammar and pragmatic competence

In figure 1 there's a scatter plot that shows the distribution of student's scores in pre-
intermediate level, as the dots presents each students scores, you can clearly see that they are
scattered about so it is obvious that there is no meaningful difference between these two
variables.
The Second Question of the Study
Do grammatical knowledge and pragmatic knowledge of speech act of request relate each
other in intermediate level learners?
In order to answer this question and to understand whether there is any significant difference
between the means of the intermediate level students (mid group) the two variables were
compared. As shown in table 3 there is also a significant difference between these two
variables at intermediate level students.
Table 3. The descriptive statistics for the grammar and pragmatic competence at intermediate
level
Mean Std. Deviation N
Grammar 13.20 2.420 30
Pragmatic 8.30 2.944 30

Table 4. Correlation coefficient between grammar knowledge and pragmatic competence at

intermediate level

Grammar Pragmatic

Pearson Correlation 1 .060

Grammar Sig. (2-tailed) .752

N 30 30

Pearson Correlation .060 1

Pragmatic Sig. (2-tailed) .752

N 30 30

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Table 4 is the correlation output for intermediate level. Here the significance level is .752,
therefore greater than 0.05 (p value > 0.05) and the correlation coefficient is .060. So there is
no correlation between grammatical knowledge and pragmatic competence of these two
variables at the intermediate level and the second hypothesis is accepted. So we can conclude
from the results obtained that there is no statistically significant correlation between
grammatical knowledge and pragmatic competence, this means that increases in grammatical
knowledge is not correlated with increases in pragmatic competence of speech act of request
in Iranian students at intermediate level.

Figure 2. Intermediate level scatter graph in grammar and pragmatic competence

In figure 2 the scatter plot shows the dots or in other words it indicates that the students'
scores are so scattered about and the dots are not densely positioned in one place, instead they
are all over the place, so in this case we have a zero correlation between these two variables.
The Third Question of the Study
Do grammatical knowledge and pragmatic competence of speech acts relate to each other in
advanced level learners?
To answer this question the two variables were compared
Table 5 shows the mean differences and standard deviation of advanced level students. As
shown there is a difference between these groups.
Table 5. The descriptive statistics for the grammar and pragmatic competence at advanced level

Mean Std. Deviation N

Grammar 15.30 2.015 30

Pragmatic 10.40 2.551 30

The last table is the correlation coefficient output at the advanced level. The significance
level is .000 that is less than 0.05 and the correlation coefficient is 0.96. As p-value is < 0.05
so there is a relationship of 0.96 between the grammatical knowledge and pragmatic
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competence of these two variables and the third hypothesis is rejected. So it can be concluded
that there is a positive statistically significant correlation between grammatical knowledge
and pragmatic competence of Iranian advanced students
Table 6. Correlation coefficient between grammar knowledge and pragmatic competence at
advanced level

Grammar Pragmatic

Pearson Correlation 1 .967**

Grammar Sig. (2-tailed) .000

N 30 30

Pearson Correlation .967** 1

Pragmatic Sig. (2-tailed) .000

N 30 30
**. Correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).
Therefore it shows that increases in grammatical knowledge do significantly relate to
increases in pragmatic competence of advanced students. A positive relationship is supported.

Figure 3. Advanced level scatter graph in grammar and pragmatic competence

Figure 3 Shows the scatter plot of advanced level students, as it is shown the dots seem to go
together to form a straight line and the line in this graph slopes upward from the lower scores
to higher scores. So we have a positive relationship and a linear relationship exists between
the grammatical knowledge and pragmatic knowledge of students in advanced level students.
Results of Hypothesis Testing
The research questions of the present study about the relationship between grammatical
knowledge and pragmatic knowledge of speech act of request in different level students were
investigated .and in this case it was found that the students with higher proficiency in
grammatical knowledge performed better than those with lower grammatical knowledge.
The first hypothesis of the study had been confirmed because of the results of the Pearson
correlation that presented a significant difference between the participants performance in
lower group.

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Also the second hypothesis of the study had been accepted according to the results of the
Pearson correlation. It indicated that the students performance were not significantly different
to the previous group.
Finally in the third hypothesis of the study the correlation results presented a positive
relationship between the grammar knowledge and the pragmatic knowledge of speech act of
request in advanced group. In other words, increase in grammatical knowledge does
significantly increase the pragmatic competence of speech act of request in students with high
level of proficiency. So the third hypothesis of the study had been rejected.
Pragmatic and grammatical competence shows a regular imbalance in the sense that
grammatical competence exceeds pragmatic competence (Bardovi-Harlig and Dörnyei,
1998). This imbalance may be due to the Materials FL learners are presented with, both in the
form of written tasks (Salazar and Usó, in press), and transcripts they have to listen to. It was
found that there is not a positive and significant relationship between grammatical knowledge
(language proficiency) and the pragmatic knowledge in the low groups’ level. In addition, it
was also revealed that the difference between the three groups of language proficiency (high,
mid and low) in terms of their pragmatic knowledge is not significant especially in pre-
intermediate and intermediate groups. But in advanced group although there's also a slight
difference in their mean and standard deviation but not significant. So in answering the
research question, seeking differences of pragmatic competence in requesting of learners with
different language proficiency, results showed significant differences between high- mid and
low- English proficiency learners' pragmatic ability. The participants in the high group
outperformed the mid and low-level group. The finding of this investigation also supports
Garcia's claim that pragmatic competence is different from linguistic competence (Garcia,
2004). This supports that linguistic competence is necessary for L2 speakers to be
pragmatically competent (Hoffman-Hicks, 1992).
Therefore it was found that those who are in advanced level and have more grammatical
knowledge performed better both in grammatical knowledge and pragmatic competence.

CONCLUSION
To successfully master English language in international communication, as the recent views
are moving towards English as an International language and lingua franca, people
possessing different linguistic and cultural backgrounds truly need to have intercultural
communicative competence in addition to communicative competence as a successful non-
native speaker (Byram 1997, as cited in Houghton 2009, p.70). Besides emphasizing on only
grammar aspects, teachers must encourage language learners to pay more attention on how to
use language appropriately in diverse situations and contexts and avoid making pragmatic
mistakes to breakdown the communication. To help learners avoid making pragmatic
mistake, it is necessary to instruct them the socio-cultural rules of the English, demonstrate to
them what pragmatic transfer is, and provide them with pragmatic knowledge. Pragmatic
knowledge of a language is better acquired by exposing the learners to natural environment
and authentic materials
Since the goal of EFL teaching must be to help students to communicate fluently in the target
language, instructors should focus not only on grammatical knowledge or linguistic benefits,
but also on other beneficial aspects of language like pragmatic competence in order to
communicate properly in the right situations.
the need to move away from teaching only linguistic aspects of language and neglecting from
pragmatic and socio-cultural aspects of language. Iranian EFL learners are advised to acquire

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firm linguistic knowledge. Moreover, supplementing pragmatic knowledge in English

teaching and learning is believed to help learners become proficient in the target language,
i.e. able to communicate accurately and appropriately in different situations
So in order to communicate effectively in the target language, learners of English language
need to develop pragmatic competence, which can be accomplished through pragmatic
instruction in the classroom, particularly in the spoken English class. With the raise of
pragmatic awareness, it is expected that learners will acquire the competence and their target
language performance will improve. Besides the teachers who are to explore and enhance
materials form the textbook, material developers and curriculum designers should also
include pragmatic awareness in the books and curricula.
Finally, it is important to direct L2 learners’ attention to their pragmalinguistic knowledge
and present them with an opportunity to provide introspections about what they know.

REFERENCES
[1] Bardovi-Harlig, K. & Dornyei, B. (1998). Do language learners recognize pragmatic
violations? Pragmatic versus grammatical awareness in instructed L2 learning. TESOL
Quarterly, 32(2), 233-245.
[2] Byram, M. (1997). Teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence.
Cleveland: Multilingual Matters.
[3] Crystal, D. (1997). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (pp. 300-310). Oxford:
Basil Blackwell.
[4] Farhady, H. (2006). Test of English as a Foreign Language: Farhady’s English
Courses. Tehran: Iran Language Center.
[5] Martinez-Flor, A. & Uso-Juan, E. (2010). Pragmatics and speech act performance. In
Alicia Martinez-Flor and Esther Uso-Juan (eds.). Speech Act Performance: Theoretical,
Empirical and Methodological Issues, pp. 3-20. Amesterdam: John Benjamins
[6] Kasper, G. (1997). Can pragmatic competence be taught? Retrieved August 10, 1999,
from www.lll.hawaii.edu/nflrc/NetWorks/NW6/default.html
[7] Kasper, G. & Roever, C. (2005). Pragmatics in second language learning. In Eli Hinkel
(ed.). Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning (pp. 317-
334). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associations.
[8] Leech, G. (1983). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
[9] Richards, Jack C. & Schmidts, R. (2002). Dictionary of Language Teaching and
Applied Linguistics (3rd ed). UK: Pearson Education Press
[10] Rose, K. R. (1997). Pragmatics in the classroom: theoretical concerns and practical
possibilities. In L. F. Bouton (Ed.), Pragmatics and Language Learning. Monograph
Series (Vol.8). Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois.
[11] Taylor, D. S. (1988). The meaning and use of the term “Competence” in linguistics and
applied linguistics. Applied Linguistics, 9(2), 148-168.
[12] Yule, G. (1996). The study of language (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press.

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