Interlanguage Productions of Student-Lecturer Disagreements in Classroom: Comparing Thai EFL Learners’ Pragmatic Knowledge

Abstract

The study’s chief goal is to compare two groups of Thai EFL learners in terms of their pragmatic knowledge when they express student-lecturer disagreements in English in a classroom context. The two groups of Thai EFL learners had different intensities of interaction (i.e. more frequently versus less frequently) with English inside the classroom. Their levels of English proficiency were equally intermediate, based on their average scores from an English proficiency test. Although disagreements were in identical contexts, it was postulated that their pragmatic knowledge was divergent due to the imbalanced frequencies of interaction with English in the classroom. The data were collected by a means of videotaping two selected classrooms of 18−20 students for 30 hours for 10 consecutive weeks. The results show that those who had more intensity of interaction with English in the classroom (henceforth the EFLe) normally utilized on-record strategies, that is, they disagreed with the lecturer explicitly. By contrast, those who had less intensity of interaction with English in the classroom (henceforth the EFLt) normally used negative politeness strategies, that is, they modified their disagreements through imposition minimizers. Thus, the variable was confirmed to invoke dissimilarities between the two groups in terms of their pragmatic knowledge; intensity of interaction with English inside the classroom has been proved to influence the Thai EFL learners’ pragmatic knowledge.