Abstract:

The main goal of this study is to investigate the perceived degree of grammatical and pragmatic awareness of the freshman and senior students at English Language Teaching Department. With this aim, the participants were chosen randomly from freshman (N=26) and senior (N=22) students. This study adopted a quantitative research design by gathering data from discourse completion tasks involving twenty scenarios. Except four of the scenarios, they included either grammatical or pragmatic errors. The statistical findings revealed that there is no significant difference between freshman and senior students with respect to their degree of grammatical and pragmatic awareness. However, students were found to have significantly higher degree of pragmatic awareness than grammatical awareness. In addition, students rated pragmatic errors as more severe than the grammatical ones. These findings might be related with the ELT curriculum. The courses they take such as Oral Communication Skills and World Englishes and Culture might have raised their pragmatic awareness and shifted their focus from grammar towards communcative and pragmatic aspect of language. The overall results of the study has a number of pedagogical implications for language learning and teaching.

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