Browsing by Author "Mushaandja, Theresia"

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    The communicative competence of undergraduate students at the Namibia University of Science and Technology, Namibia
    (Journal of Applied Linguistics and Language Research, 2024) Henghono, Wilhem Shounawa; Woldemariam, Haileleul Zeleke; Mushaandja, Theresia
    The current study aimed to contribute towards the assessment of the pragmatic and communicative competence of second-year students in the department of communication at the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST). The significance of pragmatic competence in a multilingual setting where English is the medium of instruction cannot be underestimated for the successful social integration of L2 speakers, which has been highlighted, and the need for assessing it has grown. The study specifically focused on assessing the level of students’ pragmatic competence by discovering the politeness level found in speech acts such as apologies, requests, and complaints. This study assesses these speech acts' syntactical structures and how important they are for determining and achieving pragmatic competence. A Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT) was administered to study the formulation of apologies, requests, and complaint strategies, followed by an open-ended questionnaire, which was analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. A high pragmatic level was observed in request strategies, unlike in complaints where a low level of pragmatic competence is indicated, as more face-threatening acts were recorded. It further recorded that syntactical structures played a huge role in students’ production of speech acts, whereby impoliteness was recorded in the use of imperatives. The indication of these disparities among participants in pragmatic competence is mainly caused by the differences in age, cultural differences, and different cultural backgrounds or languages. The study suggests the implementation of activities that promote pragmatic awareness and instructional materials in the English teachers training to focus on communicative language rather than just grammar.