Abstract:
As the number of students studying at tertiary institutions in a multilingual Namibia increases with English as a medium of instruction and as a second language, the significance of pragmatic competence in the successful social integration of L2 speakers has been highlighted, and the need for assessing it has grown. The majority of currently available pragmatic tests are theoretically grounded in Speech Act Theory and employ discourse completion tasks as test instruments. The purpose of this study is therefore to contribute towards the assessment of pragmatic competence in extend to their oral academic discourse at the Namibia University of Science and technology (NUST). The study specifically focused on assessing the level of students’ pragmatic competence by discovering the politeness level found in speech acts of apologies, requests, complaints. The study evaluates the syntactical structures used in these speech acts and how they are pivotal in assessing and accomplishing pragmatic competence. Data were collected from 32 NUST students doing the bachelor of English and politeness utilised as a theoretical framework. 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 were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. The main findings indicate that L2 students used different request strategies to show positive politeness. There are still students who choose to use indirect request strategies which indicate impolite behaviours or negative politeness. High pragmatic level was observed in request strategies unlike in complaints where low level of pragmatic competence is indicated as more face threatening acts were recorded. 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 from participants in pragmatic competence is mainly caused by the difference in age, cultural differences and different cultural backgrounds or languages. Therefore, the study recommends the implementation of activities which promote pragmatic awareness and also instructional materials in the training of English teachers to focus in communicative language rather than just grammar.
