Pre-service EFL teachers’ pragmatic competence: The Turkish case

It has been long recognized that English language users tend to produce grammatically correct, yet situationally inappropriate utterances. The current study investigates whether pre-service English teachers in an EFL context have acquired pragmatic competence, more specifically, it examines whether they can successfully perform certain speech acts, such as responding, giving advice, refusing, or making requests. The data consisted of 23 pre-service teachers’ responses to a discourse completion task carried out at a Turkish university. Results indicate that although these pre-service teachers tend to perform speech acts in ways that diverge from native speaker norms, most of their responses are comprehensible to other English language users including native speakers.