Iranian English Teaching Applicants Request and Apology Speech Acts: Special Focus on Language Proficiency

Considering speech act formulas as one tenet of pragmatics has been one primary aspect of research domain in the recent years. The current study probes whether proficiency level plays any part in implementing request and apology speech acts, with special focus on Iranian English Teaching Applicants (ETA). To calculate participants pragmatics performance, two Discourse Completion Tests (DCT) were administered, i.e. a multiple choice (MDCT) and a written form (WDCT), each of which was comprised of 10 request and 10 apology situations. MDCT was adopted from Birjandi and Rezaee (2010), and WDCT was adopted from Jianda (2006), and Olshtain and Cohen (1990). Participants of the study were 157 (81 males and 76 females) English teaching applicants studying in several language centers in Iran. After homogenizing the participants, Pearson product moment correlation was run to detect the relationship between two proficiency level groups (i.e., highscore and lowscore) proficiency scores and their request and apology realization. The resulting data revealed that different proficiency level did not produce any significant differences in request and apology speech act production. Accordingly, proficiency level may not be an influential variable in request and apology realization. The results of this study can inform English instructors and practitioners.