A Comparative Study on Speech Acts: Formal Complaints by Native Speakers and Turkish Learners of English

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the pragmatic language behavior of Turkish learners of English informal complaint situations through the comparison of their speech act performances to those of nativespeakers. The data was collected from a total of 276 participants, 132 Native Speakers (NSs) and 144Turkish Learners (TLs) of English. Three different data collection methods were used: a) DiscourseEvaluation Task (DET); b) video-recorded role plays; and c) open-ended oral interviews. The resultsindicate that native English speakers’ and Turkish learners’ production of complaints reflects asignificant difference with respect to the linguistic components and the pragmatic choices made incomplaining. A significant contribution of the current study to the literature is the Discourse EvaluationTask (DET), which is both a data collection tool and a term used for the first time in this paper.© 2018 EJAL & the Authors. Published by Eurasian Journal of Applied Linguistics (EJAL). This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY-NC-ND)(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).