Exploring the speech acts of greeting and leave taking as performed by senior high schools students and native english speakers, Cuenca, Ecuador

Abstract

Pragmatics studies how people use language in context. Many authors state that in order to improve one’s communicative competence, studying grammar, vocabulary, phonology, and syntax is not enough; one also needs to study the pragmatics of that language. Many researchers use an instrument called Discourse completion task (DCT) in order to obtain language data of a specific speech act. Using a DCT, the present exploratory research study examines the manners in which senior high schools students and native English speakers perform the speech acts of greeting and leave-taking in Cuenca, Ecuador. Following the manner in which experts in this field carry on research, the participants of the present study include sixty-one high school students of English and 15 native speakers of English. The same DCT was given to both the native and non-native speakers. The results show that when greeting, the high school students use phrases that might be considered too formal or inappropriate for this particular context. In addition, the non-native speakers seem to lack very common ways of greeting people in informal situations. In terms of leave-taking, most of the answers provided by the students seem too abrupt or even rude. It seems as though the lack of pragmatic skills for greeting and leave-taking in the students might cause failure when communicating with native or fluent English speakers.