The Interlanguage of Moroccan EFL learners: The Case of Complaints

Abstract

The present study aims to compare complaint realizations of Moroccan learners of English (MLE) with American English speakers (AE) and Moroccan Arabic speakers (MA) through an interlanguage pragmatic analysis. The study is carried out with reference to the degree of directness. The study involves 135 subjects: 108 of them are Moroccan students from Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Ibn Toufail. Kenitra. 45 MLE participants were recruited from the English department as the second group of informants, while the 45 MA group were recruited from the department of History and Geography. The 45 American participants included some volunteers from American Peace Corps Morocco and students from Duke university, North Carolina. A written discourse completion test/ task was administered to the participants both native and EFL learners in order to elicit their complaint speech act productions through five hypothetical complaint situations. Responses of Moroccan EFL learners were reviewed to verify whether they approach native speakers complaint norms or Moroccan Arabic norms in terms of directness. In the analysis of the data, all responses were categorized according to Trosborg’s (1995) complaint speech act set. The results show that Learners of English in higher education do not possess the desirable norms of complaint strategies as compared to native speakers of English. Additionally, MLEs exhibit pragmatic transfer from Moroccan Arabic in their use of high complaint strategies. The study ends up with a series of suggestions and recommendations that aim to enhance linguistic and cultural understanding of the target language.