Main Article Content
Abstract
This study aimed to analyze the front-office trainees' pragmatic competence at Valombola VTC. The trainees were tested on their ability to formulate and implement strategies for requests, their politeness principles in the speech acts of refusal and apologetic responses, and the factors that impact their pragmatic competence. Fifteen out of thirty (2022) front-office trainees enrolled in the Hospitality Department's program were chosen for the study using a systematic random sampling method. A Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT) and a questionnaire were utilized as data collection devices. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were conducted on the data about the students' pragmatic abilities. According to the study's results, the trainees' pragmatic competence was a dismal 30% when it came to the verbal act of refusing. It can be concluded that the trainees at the front desk lacked the pragmatic competence necessary to effectively respond to requests, offer apologies, and employ a refusal approach. Taking into account the outcomes of the three speech acts of asking, apologizing, and refusing, their pragmatic competence was found to be fairly low. This is in line with their preference for using their vernacular language when interacting with others, as shown even in the questionnaire. Furthermore, the results show that trainees employ various aggressive apologetic methods and reaction styles when asked to apologize. Finally, the results show that pragmatic competence is affected by several underlying issues, such as a lack of education, a low level of everyday activities involving English, and the misunderstanding of pragmatic implicature. Finally, the TVET sector as a whole and front-desk trainees in particular were advised to take English for Specific Purposes with an emphasis on pragmatic skills.
Keywords
Article Details

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
In submitting the manuscript to the FOSTER: Journal of English Language Teaching, the authors certify that:
- They are authorized by their co-authors to enter into these arrangements.
- The work described has not been formally published before, except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, review, thesis, or overlay journal.
- That it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere,
- The publication has been approved by the author(s) and by responsible authorities – tacitly or explicitly – of the institutes where the work has been carried out.
- They secure the right to reproduce any material that has already been published or copyrighted elsewhere.
- They agree to the following license and copyright agreement.
License and Copyright Agreement
Authors who publish with FOSTER: Journal of English Language Teaching agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the FOSTER: Journal of English Language Teaching right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors can enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the FOSTER: Journal of English Language Teaching published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or edit it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) before and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.
References
- Allott, N. (2018) “Conversational Implicature”, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics, Mark Aronoff (ed.), accessed 06 June 2022, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Akmajian, A., & Demers, R. A. (2000). Linguistics: An introduction to Language and Communication (4th ed.). New Delhi, India: Prentice – Hall.
- Barron, A. (2003). Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics: Learning How to do Things with Words in a Study Abroad Context. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Cohen, A. (2008). Assessing speech acts in a second language. In D. Boxer & A. Cohen (Eds.), Studying speaking to inform second language learning (pp. 302-307). Clevedon, GBR: Multilingual Matters.
- Cutting, J. (2002). Pragmatics and Discourse. London: Routledge.
- Chan, J. C.K & McDermott, Kathleen. (2006). Remembering Pragmatic Inference. Applied Cognitive Psychology 20: 633-639. DOI: 10.1002/acp.1215
- Crystal, D. (1995). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. The United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
- Crystal, D. (Ed). (2003). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (2nd Ed.). New York: Cambridge.
- Green, B. C., Johnson, A. and Bretherton, L. (2014) “Pragmatic language difficulties in children with hyperactivity and attention problems: An integrated review,” International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 49(1), 15–29.
- Horn, L. R. (2006). The border wars, in Klaus von Heusinger & Ken P. Turner (eds.), Where Semantics Meets Pragmatics, Elsevier, Amsterdam, (21–48).
- Kasper, G., & Rose, K. (2002). Pragmatic development in a second language. Boston, MA: Blackwell.
- Lakoff, R. T. (1990). Talking Power: The Politics in language in our lives. Glasgow: Harper Collins.
- Larson, R., & Segal, G. (1995). Knowledge of meaning: An Introduction of semantic theory. New Delhi, India: Prentice-Hall of India.
- Leech, G. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. New York, NY: Longman Publishers.
- Levinson, S. C. (1991). Pragmatics. New York. NY: Cambridge University Press.
- Levinson, Stephen C. (2000). Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Mey, Jacob L. (1993). `Pragmatics-An Introduction´ (Massachusetts)
- Norvig, P. (2007). Inference in Text Understanding. A Conference paper. Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221250738.
- Searle, J. R. (2005). Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Taguchi, N., Li, S., & Liu, Y. (2013). Comprehension of conversational implicature in L2 Chinese. Pragmatics and Cognition, 21(1), 139-157.
- Taguchi, N. (2015). Instructed pragmatics at a glance: Where instructional studies were, are, and should be going. Language Teaching, 48, 1–50.
- Taguchi, N. (2017). Interlanguage pragmatics. In A. Barron, P. Grundy, & G. Yueguo (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of pragmatics (pp. 153–167). Oxford/New York: Routledge.
- Thomas, J. (1995). Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics (Learning about Language). London and New York: Longman.
- Trosborg, A. (1995). Interlanguage pragmatics: Requests, complaints, and apologies. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.
- Wills, C. (2017). Inferences and Human Inference Abilities. Online article.