The bi-directional pragmatic transfer of the invitation speech act between Arabic and English in EFL bilingual students

Abstract

The study investigates the relation between the phenomenon of pragmatic transfer/failure (Arabic and English) and factors of the amount of L2 social contact, bilingual users' location, and users' strategy to practice English (L2). The first phase was interviewing and conducting role plays for both monolingual Arabic and English groups to explore social practices, pragmatic patterns, and utterances when inviting or invited. An invitation taxonomy and pragmatic patterns were created in this phase about Arabic and English genuine and ostensible invitations. The second phase was relying on these explored similarities and differences between monolingual groups to design a multiple choice DCT (in Arabic and English) and test the performance of monolingual and bilingual participants in the speech act of inviting and replying to invitations. A mathematical equation was introduced to analyse the similarities and differences between monolingual and bilingual choices in social and pragmatic utterances and decisions, and inferential tests were run to test correlations between factors. It was found that pragmatic transfer in both directions happened in EFL settings even for participants who lived in villages which suggested there was no significance for the bilingual location inside or outside the city. Additionally, the amount of social contact in L2 was a significant factor that correlated with the pragmatic transfer in both directions. These findings can be related to in the fields of second language acquisition, pedagogy, and curriculum designing. The findings highlighted the possible effective role that internet and social media can play in improving L2 users’ pragmatic competence.