ADVICE STRATEGIES IN ENGLISH BY MALAY UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

The present study is an attempt to examine speech act of advice realized by Malay university students. To this end, the data were collected by an open-ended questionnaire in the form of Discourse Completion Test (DCT) and a Multiple Choice Questionnaire (MCQ) from thirty Malay university students at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Malaysia. The data were then analyzed based on Hinkel’s (1997) taxonomy of speech act of advice. The findings show that DCT and MCQ yielded quite different responses with regard to the use of direct and indirect advice acts among Malay university students. Finally, based on students’ performance using different instruments in the present study they might require some pedagogical intervention to become pragmatically competent. Therefore, the study recommends teaching the cultural aspects of language which is a vital part of teachers’ to aid students in becoming successful second language speakers.