Saudi female students' communicative strategies: A socio-pragmatic exploration on EFL speech acts

This study aims to examine whether explicit classroom instruction fosters the production of pragmatically appropriate requests of Saudi female English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. A pretest/posttest design was adopted to identify and examine the effectiveness of explicit instruction on the ability of sixty Saudi female EFL learners for producing adequate requests during the 2016-2017 academic year. Results revealed that there is a positive and significant difference between the scores of both groups. The posttest mean score did not increase and remained constant, similar to the pretest. On the contrary, an average score of 27.6 in the pre written discourse completion test (WDCT) slightly decreased in the post WDCT with a mean score of 26.2 with no statistically significant difference (p =.123 > 0.05). Learners noticed the insights and similarities between target and native pragmatic knowledge to boost positive transfers while ignoring negative ones.