Bridging Pragmatic Gaps in Jordanian EFL: A Path to Effective Communication

Authors

  • Dina Mahmoud Hammouri

    Department of English Language and Translation, Applied Science Private University, Amman 11937, Jordan
  • Abdullah Mohammad Al-Momani

    Department of English Language and Translation, Applied Science Private University, Amman 11937, Jordan 

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v7i2.8329
Received: 6 December 2024 | Revised: 22 January 2025 | Accepted: 29 January 2025 | Published Online: 25 February 2025

Abstract

This study focuses on potential pragmatic failure instances by investigating Jordanian EFL pragmatic competence through the production of speech acts such as responding to requests, making suggestions, making threats, and expressing farewells. A total of 160 responses were gathered from Jordanian EFL learners using an oral discourse completion task as the data collection instrument. The results revealed that there were instances in the learners’ responses that may lead to cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Moreover, the results of the data from the tests on speech acts showed the learners’ tendency towards performing distrustful, socially unacceptable, offensive, awkward, inconvenient, and uncommon responses. The results also suggested the learners’ lack of pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic knowledge. The implication of this study is for pedagogical material designers to provide sufficient and well-organized pragmatic input. Further implications of this study are also for language teachers to fortify this material by teaching interlanguage pragmatics in English as a foreign language context to draw learners’ attention to socio-pragmatic features, to pay more attention to these areas and allocate more time and practice to solve learners’ problems in these speech acts. Such efforts are vital for equipping learners with the skills necessary for successful intercultural communication to bridge these gaps.

Keywords:

Jordanian EFL Learner; Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Knowledge; Pragmalinguistic Failure; Sociopragmatic Failure

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How to Cite

Hammouri, D. M., & Al-Momani, A. M. (2025). Bridging Pragmatic Gaps in Jordanian EFL: A Path to Effective Communication. Forum for Linguistic Studies, 7(2), 1016–1028. https://doi.org/10.30564/fls.v7i2.8329

Issue

Vol. 7 , Iss. 2 (February 2025)

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Article

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Copyright © 2025 Dina Mahmoud Hammouri, Mohammad Al-Momani

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This is an open access article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.