Pragmatic Competence in Business Context: A Case Study of Thai EFL University Students

Abstract

The present study investigated the development of pragmatic competence of Thai EFL university students majoring in business studies. Data were collected from two groups of participants, 40 first-year and 40 third-year EFL students, all majoring in business studies in a university in Thailand. The participants’ pragmatic competence was evaluated by employing a Written Discourse Completion Test (WDCT) which covered 16 business scenarios aiming to elicit 4 face-threatening acts: refusal, request, complaint, and advice. Comparisons between the two groups’ WDCT data revealed that when confronting the 4 face-threatening acts in business interactions, the third-year participants demonstrated a statistically noticeable improvement compared to their first-year counterparts and were proved to have a relatively wider access to typical expressions, appropriate amount of information and politeness strategies in the business situations under examination. Finally, based on the interviews with selected informants from the two groups, 6 potential factors, i.e. explicit instruction, textbooks, input from multimedia sources, L1 transfer, language proficiency and output, were identified for the intricate roles they each played in accounting for the participants’ development in pragmatic competence.