STUDENTS’ PRAGMATIC AWARENESS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR ENGLISH CLASSROOM TEACHING AT THUONG MAI UNIVERSITY

Abstract

This study was carried out to examine Thuong Mai non-English major students’ awareness of two speech acts of requesting and greeting, their pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic understanding based on these speech acts. The participants were 5 Americans and 50 non-English major freshmen at Thuong Mai University (TMU). Two survey questionnaires were employed as research instruments. The results show that the students’ awareness of speech acts was low. The speech act of requesting comes to the fore with the larger number of participants having the correct answers, whereas the speech act of greeting enjoyed the lower correct response rate. The students’ understanding of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects was still limited. The aspect of politeness was paid the most attention to while that of cultural norms was least focused on. A number of suggestions for promoting students’ pragmatic awareness were given to TMU teachers and students of English.