A Pragmatic Competence Analysis of Gratitude Strategies in English Used by EFL Teachers Regarding Their Academic Discipline

Providing knowledge for effective communication cannot just be limited to teaching linguistic information, and pragmatic competence should also be considered. Since the main goal of teaching foreign languages is related to teachers, their proficiency and pragmatic awareness are very important; Nevertheless, the conditions for the acquisition of speech acts is not provided adequately. In this regard, the present study aims to analyze the pragmatic competence of Iranian EFL teachers considering the strategies of expressing speech act gratitude in English. In order to evaluate the use of strategies of expressing gratitude, a Discourse Completion Task questionnaire (DCT) and a coding scheme proposed by Cheng were used. Also, the Gratitude Questionnaire-Six Item Form (GQ-6) was employed to study the influence of personality on expressing gratitude. The questionnaires were distributed randomly, and the male and female participants were asked to fill the discourse completion task. They were expected to write down as many words or utterances as they wanted to express their gratitude towards the situation in a limited time. Finally, 133 completed questionnaires were collected. Then, responses were coded based on the Cheng coding scheme. The findings showed that all 8 gratitude strategies of the Cheng model were applied by teachers. The "Thanking" strategy was the most frequent (39.9%). Also, the results of the Kruskal-Wallis H test showed that the three groups of instructor's field of study (academic discipline) do not show any significant difference in expressing their gratitude strategies.