Pragmatic Competence of Request Speech Act Produced and Perceived by Jordanian Students in Online-Classes

الملخص

Abstract

This paper is concerned with exploring and describing the pragmatic competence and practices of request speech act among Jordanian students who joined online-based learning at the World Islamic Sciences & Education University (WISE) in Jordan. It also aims at investigating whether their pragmatic competence was affected by the rapid change from conventional face-to-face (F2F) classes to online classes resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic conditions as perceived by their instructors. The quantitative research approach was applied in this study using a questionnaire as an instrument. The subjects in this study were 10 lecturers at WISE. The findings of this study indicated that the pragmatic knowledge that reflects the degree of familiarity, power, and the level of politeness and directness was generally average in the utterances of Jordanian students in perceiving and producing request speech acts in online classes as perceived by their lecturers. Regarding the perceptions of faculty members towards the impact of the rapid change from conventional F2F classes to online classes on the pragmatic competence of Jordanian students, it was found that pragmatic competence was not significantly affected. This study was predictable to be an assessment material for numerous parties, including decision makers of higher education, when designing and developing online courses which meet the sensitivity of teaching speech acts in general and request speech acts in particular.

Keywords: Pragmatic competence, Request, Speech act, Online Classes.