Students’ Utilizing Speech Acts among Bilinguals and Native Speakers

Abstract

The main objective of  this research  is on Iraqi and English  native speakers and Arabic utterances of the speech act i.e. how do they linguistically understand it in terms of techniques  used devices, and comprehend it. Students from different linguistic backgrounds utilize different speech act techniques. One of the important perspectives that needs to be noted while translating Arabic into other languages such as English is the speech act (shifting), which makes Arabic unique, complicated and different from other languages. Data was collected by means of a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) consisting of six hypothetical situations. DCTs according to Kasper (1992) "are written questioners including a number of brief descriptions, followed by a short dialog with an empty slot for the speech act under study . The result showed that at a sociopragmatic level, the way in which speakers choose to formulate a speech act and, more specifically, the amount and type of modification chosen, has been found to be affected by a number of social and situational/contextual variables. The assessment of these social and situational/contextual variables covers the social perceptions that underlie the use of a speech act, i.e., sociopragmatics. In this research study, Arabic and English are evaluated according to their position in the hierarchy and to their degree of social encoding. the study relies on Brown and Levinson’s theory of speech act and mainly, there is a research of the methods in which speech acts threatening a person’s feeling of face are alleviated.