Apology among learners of Arabic Language in Nigeria (Southwest): A Pragmatic Linguistics Study of Influences of The Learning Context and the Form of Performance

Abstract

Abstract: The present study focused on the act of Apology among learners of Arabic as a foreign language in Southwestern Nigeria. A sample of 70 senior secondary school learners of Arabic was recruited and randomly assigned to two groups: the intermediate and the advanced groups. The researcher used Discourse Completion Tests (DCT) to measure the performance level of the Apology act with the research participants. The researcher, in order to provide answers to the research questions, used the descriptive percentage statistics to calculate and demonstrate the effects of language level on the use of apology strategies among the research samples. The results have shown that Arabic learners in Southwestern Nigeria are generally familiar with apologies, except that the two groups exhibited some weaknesses in their language competency and pragmatic performances which have to be rectified. Finally, the results also revealed some differences in the sample's performance in terms of the influence of the linguistic level factor and the weight of the required tasks to be implemented apart from new strategies which were used by the students to perform the verbal apology act; which gives impression of the presence of pragmatic intuition among the students in the research sample.

Keywords: Interlanguage Pragmatics, Offering Apology, Speech Act, Communicative Competence, Pragmatic Transfer, Language Learner.