Saudi and Jordanian Undergraduates' Complaining Strategies: A Comparative Intralanguage Educational Linguistic Study

Abstract

The present study is an attempt to explore, investigate, and compare the complaint strategies among two groups of Arabic native speakers, Saudi and Jordanian undergraduate students. To achieve the goals of the study, a discourse completion test (DCT) was developed and distributed to 150 male participants randomly selected from the governorates of Irbid and Riyadh universities to participate in the study. The findings of the study showed that Saudi and Jordanian university male students do complain to others using a wide range of strategies. Their complaints fell into four categories: Calmness and Rationality, Offensive Act, Opting-out, and Direct Complaint respectively. It was also found that Saudi university students' complaint comes first , while Jordanian university students' complaint comes second. The findings further revealed that there were some statistically significant differences and similarities at (α≤ 0.05) among the Saudi and Jordanian university male students' complaint strategies to others due to the study variables. Conclusions, implications, and suggestions for further research are reported.

A Video-driven Approach to Promoting Pragmatic Development in the Context of English as a Foreign Language

“…The current research has further documented that the speech act of complaint represents a communication difficulty for ESL/EFL learners in various aspects, such as formulas, strategy selection, the realization of the influence of contextual variables due to its complex nature, and lack of sufficient sociopragmatic knowledge among non-native speakers of English (Deveci, 2015;Li & Suleiman, 2017;Yuan & Zhang, 2018). Very few studies have been conducted on Saudi EFL students' performance of the speech act of complaint (Al-Shorman, 2016;Assallom, 2010;, and interventional pragmatic studies on complaints are still lacking. Rashidi (2017) argues, "Saudi learners have not so far contributed to interlanguage pragmatic research on complaints" (p. 12).…”

“…Unlike other speech acts, complaining was comparably less investigated due to its complexity; it does not have pre-determined linguistic forms and the interpretations of the complaint formulas are often negotiable (Chen et al, 2011). More specifically, hardly any attention has been given to the teachability, learnability, and performance of complaints among Arab foreign language learners (Al-Shorman, 2016;Rashidi, 2017), and this has motivated the present study.…”

“…Many have conclusively reported positive effects on language learners' pragmatic performance regardless of linguistic background. The speech act of complaint is a relatively under-represented speech act in interlanguage pragmatic research, particularly in foreign language contexts(Al-Shorman, 2016;…”

Analysis of complaining strategies on services offered to Facebook users on Zain Jordan

“…Drawing on the above literature, to date, it seems that several research papers have addressed complaining strategies. Most of them tackled complaints in ordinary conversations, cross-cultural, and intra-language speech act realizations of complaining (see Al-Khawaldeh, 2016;Al-Shorman, 2016). However, these studies have not discussed complaints in the context of social media.…”

Pragmatic Performance in Focus: The Case of Saudi Graduates Giving Advice in English: الأداء البراغماتي: تقديم المشورة باللغة الإنجليزية من قبل الخريجين السعوديين

“…A number of speech acts, such as requests, compliments, apologies, refusals, and complaints, have been widely researched in the field of interlanguage pragmatics (e.g., Al-Shorman, 2016;Alsuhaibani, 2020;Alsulayyi, 2017;Beltran-Planques & Querol-Julian, 2018;Chang, 2010;Grossi, 2009;Han & Burgucu-Tazegül, 2016;Kreishan, 2018;Roever & Al-Gahtani, 2015;Su & Ren, 2017). However, there is a paucity of research examining the speech acts of L2 speakers giving advice.…”