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Negative Politeness Strategies (Brown and Levinson, 1987:131)
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ABSRACT Pragmatic competence forms a basic pillar in learning and teaching the communicative use of a foreign language (FL). Evaluating the FL pragmatic knowledge is a challenging and complex area of language testing. Far from the grammatical content of language, the current study aims to evaluate EFL learners' pragmatic competence in terms of comm...
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Citations
Focusing on integrating teaching and learning grammatical structures in real actions and practices has been critical and one of the cornerstones in the Teaching English as a Second Language (TESOL) domain. This paper emphasizes exposing EFL learners to actual tasks and opportunities they can benefit from in their future careers, along with understanding the meanings and functions of gerunds and infinitives. The situated learning theory was used to frame the current study on EFL students taking the grammar 1 course. The number of students was 60, but the study sample was seven students, which selected randomly. Students were guided to use gerunds and infinitives to develop a cover letter for one of the agencies they selected rather than apply those rules to artificial tasks. The sampled data of the qualitative research was used to analyze students’ cover letters by investigating two main concepts. First, their use of gerunds and infinitives; second, the elements of writing professional cover letters. The findings showed students’ accurate usage of gerunds and infinitives in different phrases, such as opening, closing, and body paragraphs, to present their educational background and experiences. Thus, the findings showed that the cover letters that have been written by the participants were not the best, but they achieved the general guidelines of creating cover letters and applied the targeted rules. EFL teachers are recommended to enhance their students with variety of authentic tasks that integrate the use of grammatical structures and the practice of using these structurers in real tasks.
