Investigating The Effect Of Authentic Materials On Improving Efl Learners' Pragmatic Competence The Case Of Third Year Students, Department Of English, University Of Batna 2. Doctorat Thesis, (2021) Université De Batna 2.

Résumé: The ever-growing demand for English in Algeria necessitates the shift from teaching English as a language to teaching the appropriate use of English to achieve different pragmatic needs and requirements which is supported by the most recent research in the field. The Department of English at the University of Batna is not an exception to this necessity where many teachers are aware of this need and believe that learners‘ pragmatic competence and communicative abilities should be the focus of teaching Oral Expression. However, there is a gap in knowing the best and most suitable ways of developing learners‘ pragmatic abilities. Thus, this study aims at investigating this research gap by investigating the role and effect size of authentic materials in developing learners‘ pragmatic competence in performing four major speech acts which are requests, apologies, refusals, and compliments. Also, it investigates the best ways of implementing authentic materials in teaching Oral Expression through the available literature and the experiment process. Therefore, this study was conducted using an experiment that included a sample of two groups of 91 learners out of 732 third-year learners. The two groups were assigned to be the control group and experimental group to measure the effect of the treatment. A written discourse completion test (WDCT) was used as a post-test and a pre-test, which allowed gathering significant data which prove that authentic materials have developed learners‘ pragmatic competence in a statistically significant manner compared to the contrived materials used to teach the control group. The findings reveal that authentic materials have a tremendous effect size on developing learners‘ pragmatic abilities, thus help give more insight on the present gap for future research and practical solutions such as teacher-training workshops.

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