THE IMPACT OF METALINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE AND PROFICIENCY LEVEL ON PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE OF IRANIAN EFL LEARNERS

The purpose of the present study was to investigate if proficiency level and metalinguistic knowledge affect Iranian EFL learnersʹ degree of pragmatic competence. Participants included 92 junior students at Shiraz Azad University. The elicitation instruments used for data collection were a. Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT), used to measure the testees’ proficiency level, b. a Grammaticality Judgement Test (GJT), to show their metalinguistic knowledge, and c. the Discourse Completion Test (DCT) developed by Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Weltz (1990), to investigate their level of pragmatic competence. Based on their scores on the OQPT, the participants were divided into three groups of high, mid, and low proficiency. The data collected from the administration of the above mentioned three tests were then analyzed by the descriptive statistics, Repeated Measures ANOVA and correlation. The results revealed that proficiency level is not the factor which determines the students’ degree of pragmatic competence as there was no significant relationship between the students’ proficiency level at different groups and their performance on the DCT. However, it was observed that the students’ pragmatic competence is significantly affected by their metalinguistic knowledge.