Discourse Analysis of Speech Acts of Thanking by Bahraini and Vietnamese ESL Learners

Abstract

Language teaching has changed from the traditional focus on grammatical competence to communicative competence. The prevailing point of view in the field of pragmatics is that “two participants with two different value systems underlying each of their first language (L1) cultural group (Click, 1886 as cited in Cheng, 2011) transferred their L1 pragmatic rules into a second or foreign language (L2) domains” (Mascuñana & Patron, 2013). It is also widely accepted that different cultures structure discourse differently (Demir & Takkaç, 2016). Based on these assumptions, this paper employed a textual discourse analysis to examine the thanking strategies and the semantic formulas used by Vietnamese and Bahraini ESL students in their letters. This study
focused on identifying the students’ semantic expressions in thanking based on the 19 forms of thanking identified by Cheng and Seto (2015) and analyzing the students’ thanking strategies based on Eisenstein and Bodman (1986) and Aijmer (1996) as cited by Demir and Takkaç (2016). Results showed that the students had limited semantic formulaic expressions in expressing gratitude. Meanwhile, there are significant variations of verbal strategies among students from the two cultural groups. The findings imply that thanking, as a speech act, along with other language functions, needs to be emphasized in the ESL curriculum
in the hope of developing communicative competence inside and outside the classroom.