Inter-Language Pragmatics: How Non-Native Speakers Differ in Production and Understanding Speech Acts

According to Cohen and Olshtain (1981), the idea of inter-language pragmatics (ILP) has been emerged and introduced into language education since the adoption of the communicative approach to second language teaching and become one of the major concerns of linguistic researchers. Theoretically speaking, inter-language pragmatics (ILP) as the study of a second language use, examines how non-native speakers comprehend and produce action in the target language and investigates how L2 learners develop the ability to understand and perform action in a target language (Kasper & Dahl, 1991). Inter-language pragmatics has been in limelight recently since it plays salient role in second language learning (SLA): therefore, the importance of it can’t be ignored and underestimated by researchers. The fundamental purpose of the present paper is twofold: first, the present paper provides a theoretical background of pragmatics with a special focus on issues of importance for inter-language pragmatics and elaborates on how non-native speakers differ in production and understanding speech acts in English; then, in order to put the theory into practice, it reports on an empirical study briefly that was carried out by some linguistics researchers to describe and compare the gratitude strategies utilized by Iranian speakers, Persian learners of English, and native English speakers in confronting identical situations.