An Interplay Between Iranian EFL Learners’ Specific and General Interlanguage Pragmatic Motivation and Their Meta-pragmatic Awareness

The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between Iranian advanced EFL learners’ meta-pragmatic awareness, its subscale features, and their general and specific pragmatic motivation. In this regard, the speech act of refusal was selected as a target speech act because of its face-threatening feature. Eighty-two participants took part in the study, of whom 78 were Iranian EFL learners, and the rest (N=4) were American native speakers. All participants were required to complete a multiple choice meta-pragmatic awareness questionnaire (MPAQ) consisting of 12 situations representing refusal to four topics. Refusal scenarios were balanced in terms of interlocutors’ social status, degree of familiarity, and degree of imposition. Iranian learners were then asked to complete 48 items of general and specific pragmatic motivation questionnaire adopted from Tajeddin and Zand-Moghadam (2012). Analyzing data using Pearson correlation indicated that there was a significant correlation between Iranian advanced EFL learners’ meta-pragmatic awareness and their general and specific pragmatic motivation. In addition, there was a significant positive correlation between meta-pragmatic awareness and severity, familiarity, and degree of imposition or severity. Moreover, employing Path Analysis through Amos 24 to examine whether meta-pragmatic awareness and its subscales could predict general and speech-act-specific pragmatic motivation demonstrated that all three sub-constructs of meta-pragmatic awareness predicted general and specific pragmatic motivation positively and significantly. This study is of immense importance as it helps teachers consider the importance of maintaining face in a conversation to help learners increase the motivation of learning making refusals.