The Production of the Speech Act of Advice by Iraqi EFL Female Students: A Pragmatic Study

This study examined the importance of instructing pragmatic competence. The research assessed the pragmatic competence levels of Iraqi EFL female students when producing the speech act of advice. The current study was conducted at the Department of the English Language, College of Education for Women, University of Baghdad, Iraq, 2024/2025. The participants of this study were two groups, a beginner group and an advanced group; each group contained 30 female students. The primary purpose of the study was to compare the advising speech act as performed by Iraqi EFL female advanced students with a high level of proficiency and Iraqi EFL female beginner students with a low proficiency level. This study demonstrates the significance of explicit pragmatic education in EFL classes, indicating that focused teaching of speech acts may reduce negative transfer from the native language and enhance intercultural communication performance. Therefore, the study examined the ability of Iraqi EFL female users to use appropriate pragmatic expressions when giving advice as well as the observable variations in the level of (in)directness between the two groups. The data-collection tool was the Discourse Completion Task. The statistical program, SPSS, analyzed these data. The findings of this study revealed that, at earlier stages of EFL learning, Iraqi EFL students’ perception of directness when giving advice is influenced by Arabic (L1) as their proficiency develops.