The Psychological Predictors of Sociopragmatics

The study of Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP), as a predominantly social construct, has been prevalent in Applied Linguistics and other related disciplines for several decades. However, the majority of research in this field has focused on either the social or linguistic dimensions of pragmatic competence and few studies have investigated the role of psychological constructs in ILP. Therefore, the present study set out to investigate and consequently compare the prediction power of Emotional Intelligence, Willingness to Communicate (WTC), and motivation when it comes to pragmatic competence. To this end, a sample of 150 non-native speakers of English were asked to fill in Bar-On’s EQi, the Pragmatic Motivation inventory, and MacIntyre’s WTC questionnaire as well as a multiple-choice discourse completion test. The results of a Multiple Regression analysis revealed that the relationship between these psychological constructs and pragmatic competence, or at least its comprehension component, is not always as straight forward as anticipated and involves particular intricacies. The findings propose a number of implications in pragmatic instruction within TEFL.